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MAN AND HIS ANCESTOR 


MAN AND HIS ANCESTOR 


gh SIM OION ES GENE TS VAOVG TE CONN 


BY 


CHARLES MORRIS 


AUTHOR OF “CIVILIZATION: AN HISTORICAL REVIEW 
OF ITS ELEMENTS,” “ THE ARYAN RACE,” ETC, 


New Work 


THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 
LONDON: MACMILLAN AND CO.,, L1p. 
1900 


All rights reserved 


CoPYRIGHT, 1900, 


By THE MACMILLAN COMPANY. 


Norfooot Yress 
J.S. Cushing & Co. — Berwick & Smith 
Norwood Mass. U.S.A. 


lds eve RGle 


It would be difficult to find any intelligent per- 
son in this age of the world who has not some 
theory Or opinion in regard to the origin of man, 
and perhaps almost as difficult to find any such 
person who can give a good and sufficient reason 
for the faith that isin him. This is especially the 
case with those who look upon man as a product 
of evolution, a natural outgrowth from the world 
of lower life, since here simple faith or ancient 
authority is. not sufficient, as in the creation hy- 
pothesis, but scientific evidence and logical argu- 
ment are necessary. It is to enable this class of 
readers to test the quality and sufficiency of their 
belief that this book has been prepared. 

The question of the evolutionary origin of man 
has been by no means neglected by recent authors, 
yet it has been dealt with chiefly as a side issue in 
works of a more extended purpose, and largely in 
technical language, simple to the scientist, but dif- 
ficult to the general reader. The only work that 
makes this subject its leading theme, Darwin’s 
“ Descent of Man,” adds to it a still longer treatise 
Gia e iia erociccrion.; 50.) that. themsubjecemoL 


V 


vi PREFACE 


man’s evolutionary origin cannot be said to have 
been yet dealt with for itself alone. Darwin's 
work, moreover, is now nearly thirty years old, 
and to this extent antiquated, while at best it 
cannot be considered as well suited for general 
reading. 

These considerations have given rise to the 
present work, in which an effort has been made 
to present the subject of man’s origin in a popular 
manner, to dwell on the various significant facts 
that have been discovered since Darwin’s time, 
and to offer certain lines of evidence never before 
presented in this connection, and which seem to 
add much strength to the general argument. 

The subject is one of such widespread interest 
as to make it probable that a plain and brief pres- 
entation of it will be acceptable, both to enable 
those who are evolutionists in principle to learn on 
what grounds their acceptance of this phase of 
evolution stands, and to aid those who are at sea 
on the whole subject of man’s origin to reach some 
fixed conclusion. For these purposes this little 
book has been set afloat, with the hope that it may 
carry some doubters to solid land and teach some 
believers the fundamental elements of their faith. 


CHAPTER 


lie 
ite 


XIII. 


CONTENDS 


EVOLUTION VERSUS CREATION : : 
VESTIGES OF MAN’S ANCESTRY 2 
RELICS OF ANCIENT MAN ‘ : : 
FROM QUADRUPED TO BIPED . ; ‘ 
THE FREEDOM OF THE ARMS 

THE DEVELOPMENT OF INTELLIGENCE 
THE ORIGIN OF LANGUAGE 

How THE CHASM WAS BRIDGED 

THE FIRST STAGE OF HUMAN EVOLUTION 
THE CONFLICT WITH NATURE 
WARFARE AND CIVILIZATION . 

THE EVOLUTION OF MORALITY 


MAN’sS RELATION TO THE SPIRITUAL 2 


vii 


PAGE 


CRUDE REIL 





MAN AND HIS ANCESTOR 


I 


EVOLUTION VERSUS CREATION 


In any consideration of the origin of man we 
are necessarily restricted to two views: one, that 
he is the outcome of a development from the lower 
animals; the other, that he came into existence 
through direct creation. No third mode of origin 
can be conceived, and we may safely confine our- 
selves to a review of these two claims. They are 
the opposites of each other in every particular. 
The creation doctrine is as old almost as thinking 
man; the evolutionary doctrine belongs in effect 
to our own generation. The former is not open 
to evidence; the latter depends solely upon evi- 
dence. The former is based on authority; the 
latter on investigation. The doctrine of direct 
creation can merely be asserted, it cannot be 
argued; the statement once made, there is noth- 
ing more to be said; it is an zpse dzxzt pure and 
simple. The doctrine of evolution, on the con- 
trary, founded as it must be on ascertained facts, 
is fully open to argument, and depends for its 

B I 


2 MAN AND HIS ANCESTOR 


acceptance on the strength and validity of the 
evidence in its favor. 

If the doctrine of the direct creation of man had 
been originally presented in our own day, proof of 
the assertion would have been at once demanded, 
and the only evidence admissible would have been 
that of witnesses of the act of creation. ‘There 
could, of course, have been no human witnesses, as 
there would have been no preceding human beings, 
and witnesses not human have, in the present day, 
no standing in our courts. As the case stands, 
however, the doctrine arose in an age when man 
did not trouble himself about evidence, but was 
content to accept his opinions on authority; and 
this, strangely enough, is held by many to be a 
strong point in its favor, it gaining, in their minds, 
authenticity from antiquity. It is claimed, indeed, 
to be sustained by divine authority, but this is a 
claim that has no warrant in the words of the 
statement itself, and one to which no form of words 
could give warrant. To establish it, direct and in- 
contestable evidence from the creative power itself 
would be necessary, and it need scarcely be said 
that no such evidence exists. It is not easy, indeed, 
to conceive what form such evidence could take. 
It would certainly need to be something far more 
convincing than a statement in a book. 

It might have been better for civilized mankind 
if the opening pages of Genesis had never been 
written, since they have played a potent part in 


EVOLUTION VERSUS CREATION 3 


checking the development of thought. As the 
case now stands, the cosmological doctrines they 
contain can no longer claim even a shadow of 
divine authority, since they have been distinctly 
traced back to a human origin. It has been re- 
cently discovered that they are simply a restatement 
of the Babylonian cosmology, as given in a literary 
production ages older than the Bible, an epic poem 
of very remote date. They are, doubtless, an out- 
growth of the cosmological ideas of early man, and 
those who accept them must do so on the basis of 
belief in their probability; it is no longer per- 
missible to claim for them the warrant of divine 
origin. 

Modern science stringently demands facts in 
support of any assertion, the word “faith” having 
no place in its lexicon. Facts are absolutely and 
necessarily wanting in support of the creation 
doctrine, and the only argument its advocates can 
advance is one that deals in negatives, and demands 
its acceptance on the ground that the opposite 
doctrine has not been proved. Such an argument 
is valueless. Disproof of one statement is never 
proof of another. Its effect is simply to leave 
both unproved, and neither, therefore, in condition 
for acceptance. In the present case the weight 
of disproof is small. The facts in support of the 
evolution hypothesis are multitudinous, and many 
of them of great cogency; the facts against it are 
few, and none of them absolute. It is simply 


4 MAN AND HIS ANCESTOR 


argued that some questions remain unsolved, and 
that there are facts which seem inconsistent with 
the Darwinian theory of development, and which 
no supplementary hypotheses have explained. 
But no advocates of evolution hold that the Dar- 
winian theory. is final. Evolution is a growing 
doctrine. It has been expanding ever since it was 
first promulgated. Various seeming difficulties 
have been explained away, and it is quite possible 
that all may disappear as investigation widens. 
No such arguments add any weight to the opposite 
view, which has not and never could have any 
standing in science, since it 1s impossible to ad- 
duce any facts to sustain it. We shall therefore 
dismiss it from further consideration, and proceed 
to state certain general facts in favor of the evolu- 
tionary hypothesis of the origin of man. 


Il 


VESTIGES OF MAN’S ANCESTRY 


WHEN, some centuries ago, men began to find 
fossil remains of animals in the rocks, a severe 
shock was given to the prevailing doctrine of the 
recent creation of the earth. The adherents of 
the old theology made strenuous efforts to explain 
away this unwelcome circumstance. The shells 
found had been dropped by pilgrims on their way 
to Jerusalem; they were mineral simulations of 
shells; they had been created by the Deity and 
placed where found; they were anything but 
what they appeared to be, the existing evidences 
of a long ancient period of animal life reaching 
back very far beyond the assumed date of creation. 

It need scarcely be said that these explanations, 
especially the one that God had created fossil 
forms to deceive man, for some incomprehensible 
purpose, could not long be maintained. Some of 
them were inconsistent with the facts, others with 
common sense, and in due time it was everywhere 
admitted that the earth is of remote duration and 
has been inhabited by animals and plants for 
untold ages. Its structure revealed its history ; 
its annals were found to be written in the rocks; 
its anatomy was full of the evidences of its origin. 

5 


6 MAN AND HIS ANCESTOR 


When, not many years ago, men began to find the 
fossil remains of ancient structures in the body 
of man himself, theology was brought face to face 
with a problem as difficult to explain, from its special 
point of view, as that of the fossils in the rocks. 
As the latter had threatened and finally disproved 
the doctrine of the special creation of the earth, 
so the former assailed the doctrine of the special 
creation of man, and annihilated it in the minds 
of many eminent scientists. It formed a promi- 
nent argument in favor of the theory of organic 
evolution, and as such calls for consideration here, 
as a suitable groundwork for our special theme. 

The structures referred to may justly be called 
fossil, since they present strong evidence of being 
the useless remains of structures which played an 
active part in the bodies of some former animals. 
A significant example of this exists in the vermi- 
form appendix, a narrow, blind tube descending 
from the cecum of man, and detrimental instead 
of useful, since it 1s the seat of the frequently fatal 
disease known as appendicitis. This tube, usu- 
ally from three to six inches long and of the thick- 
ness of a goose quill, is occasionally absent in man, 
occasionally of considerable size. It is quite large, 
as compared with the other intestines, in the human 
embryo, but ceases to grow after a certain stage 
of development. The czecum is extremely long in 
some of the lower vegetable-eating animals, and the 
vermiform appendix seems to be a rudiment of the 


VESTIGES OF MAN'S ANCESTRY yi, 


formerly extended portion of this organ. It is 
large in the anthropoid apes, especially in the 
orang, in which it is very long and spirally con- 
voluted. Its survival in man as a useless and 
dangerous aborted organ is a powerful argument 
in favor of his descent from the lower animals. 

In the brain of man and many of the lower 
vertebrates, hanging by two peduncles, or strands 
of nerve fibre, from the thalami, or beds of the 
optic nerve, is a small rounded or heart-shaped 
body of about the size of a pea, known as the 
pineal gland. It is so destitute of any evident 
function that Descartes, in lack of any more prob- 
able explanation of its presence, ascribed to it the 
noble duty of serving as the seat of the soul. Late 
research has been more successful in tracking this 
organ to its lair. It is larger in the embryo than 
in the adult man, still larger in some lower verte- 
brates, and in certain lizards has been found to 
exist as an eye, its parts plainly distinguishable 
under the microscope. It is placed in the middle 
of the forehead, between the other eyes, and was 
no doubt an active organ of vision in some ancient 
batrachians. 

The pineal eye, as it is now named, once useful, 
long useless, has persisted as a fossil structure 
through a far extended line of development. No 
more convincing evidence that man gained his 
body through descent from the lower animals 
could be asked for than the survival in the human 


8 MAN AND HIS ANCESTOR 


brain of this wonderfully significant remnant of a 
formerly useful organ. Like various other vestiges 
of ancient organs, it is not only useless but detri- 
mental. It occasionally enlarges and becomes the 
seat of large and complicated tumors, which may 
cause death by their compression of the brain. 

Two other structures common to most of the 
vertebrate animals exist in man, though they ren- 
der him little or no service. These are the thymus 
and thyroid glands, apparently vestigial structures. 
The thymus gland attains a considerable develop- 
ment in the embryo and shrinks away to the 
merest vestige in the adult. It begins to form 
early in the embryo life as an epithelial ingrowth 
from the throat, and extends from the neck into 
the chest. It continues to grow after birth, but 
later begins to shrink and nearly disappears in 
the adult. 

The thyroid gland has a somewhat similar ori- 
gin, it beginning as an ingrowth from the lower 
section of the pharynx and extending down to the 
lower part of the neck. It subsequently loses its 
connection with the pharynx, and in adult life is a 
bilobed structure on either side of the windpipe. 
Like the thymus it is a ductless gland, abundantly 
supplied with blood-vessels, and possesses a vast 
number of small cavities, lined with cells and con- 
taining an insoluble jelly. So far as appears, both 
these glands are useless, or nearly so, to man; or 
if the thyroid performs any useful service it is a 


VESTIGES OF MAN’S ANCESTRY 9 


minor and obscure one. Such functions as it may 
have could probably be performed by some of the 
other organs, while it is positively detrimental as 
the seat of goitre. This unsightly disease is due 
to its enlargement, either by a great increase of 
its blood-vessels or a development of the capsules 
and increase of their contained jelly. Dr. S. V. 
Clevenger considers these organs to have had a 
branchial or respiratory origin, saying that there 
are many reasons for believing them to be rudi- 
mentary gills. Owen says that the thymus ap- 
pears in vertebrates with the establishment of the 
lung as the main or exclusive respiratory organ. It 
is wanting in all fishes, also in the gill-bearing 
batrachians, siren and proteus. The thyroid ap- 
pears in fishes, and Gegenbaur believes that it may 
have been a useful organ to the Tunicata in their 
former state of existence. 

Dr. Clevenger, in the American Naturalist for 
January, 1884, points out another curious structure 
in man, whose significance does not seem to have 
been previously observed. This is a strange and 
striking fact relating to the formation of the veins. 
It is well known that these organs possess valves, 
which permit the free upward flow of the blood 
toward the heart, but resist its descent through the 
action of gravity, in this way aiding its return from 
the extremities. The rule holds good throughout 
the quadrupeds that the vertical veins possess 
valves, while they are absent from the horizontal 


IO MAN AND HIS ANCESTOR 


veins, in which they would be of no utility. But 
the singular fact exists that in the human trunk 
the valves occur in the horizontal and are absent 
from the vertical veins. In other words, they 
exist where they are useless for their apparent 
purpose and are absent where they would be 
useful. 

The only conclusion that.can reasonably be drawn 
from this strange fact is that we are here dealing 
with a fossilized structure, a functionless survival. 
It leads irresistibly to the inference that man has 
descended from a quadruped ancestor, and that 
when his body took the upright position the struc- 
ture of the veins, not being seriously detrimental, 
remained unchanged. Those which had been 
vertical became horizontal, and retained their now 
useless valves; those which had been horizontal 
became vertical, and remained destitute of valves. 
The veins of the arms and legs, vertical in both 
forms, retained their valves. 

Dr. Clevenger points out that the intercostal 
veins, which carry blood almost horizontally back- 
ward to the azygos veins and which would run verti- 
cally upward in quadrupeds, possess valves. These 
are not only useless to man, but when he lies upon 
his back they are an actual hindrance to the free 
flow of the blood. In like manner, the inferior 
thyroid veins, whose blood flows into the innomi- 
nate, are obstructed by valves at the point of 
junction. 


VESTIGES OF MAN’S ANCESTRY If 


We quote from him as follows: “ There are two 
pairs of valves in the external jugular and one 
pair in the internal jugular, but in recognition of 
their uselessness they do not prevent regurgitation 
of blood nor liquids from passing upward. An 
apparent anomaly exists in the absence of valves 
from parts where they are most needed, as in the 
ven cave, spinal, iliac, haemorrhoidal, and portal. 


The azygos veins have imperfect valves. Place : 


men upon ‘all fours’ and the law governing the 
presence and absence of valves is at once appar- 


ent, applicable, so far as I have been able to ascer- 


tain, to all quadrupedal and quadrumanous animals: 
Dorsal veins are valved; cephalad, ventrad, and 
caudad veins have no valves.” 

Of the few exceptions to this rule, he considers the 
valves of the jugular veins as in process of becom- 
ing obsolete, and the rudimentary azygos valves as 
arecentdevelopment. Valves in the hemorrhoidal 
veins would be out of place in quadrupeds, but 
their absence in man is a serious defect in his 
organization, since the resulting engorgement of 
blood gives rise to the distressing disease known 
as piles. The presence of valves would obviate 
this. 

No one can argue that this useless and, to some 
extent, injurious condition is a designed result of 
creation. There could not, indeed, be stronger 
evidence that man has descended from a quadruped 
ancestor. Dr. Clevenger points out other serious 


b 3 


12 MAN AND HIS ANCESTOR 


results of the upright position of the body, from 
which quadrupeds are free. One of these is the 
liability to inguinal hernia, or rupture, which leads 
to much suffering and frequent death in man. 
Prolapsis uteri is another, and a third to which he 
particularly alludes is difficulty in parturition. 

It has been suggested above that the thyroid 
gland may possibly be of some minor functional 
importance, and that the thymus is developed in 
the embryo sufficiently to be functional. As regards 
the latter, no one is likely to maintain that an act 
of direct creation would include the production of 
an organ of some slight and obscure utility to the 
embryo and useless in later life. The strong prob- 
ability is that this gland belongs in the same 
category with other embryonic survivals yet to be 
pointed out. As regards the seeming function of 
the thyroid, it may be said that the surviving relic 
of an ancient functional organ is quite capable of 
varying in structure and taking upon itself a new 
function, of minor value, which in its absence 
would be left undone or be performed by some 
of the other organs. 

A highly interesting example of this exists in 
the swim-bladder of the fish, which there is good 
reason to believe is a survival of an ancient struc- 
ture used for quite a different purpose. It was 
originally developed, in the opinion of the writer,1 


1“ QOn the Air Bladder of Fishes.” Proceedings of the Academy 
of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia, 1885. 


VESTIGES OF MAN’S ANCESTRY 13 


as an air-breathing organ, In a very ancient semi- 
amphibious class of fishes, from which the existing 
bony fishes have descended. When the latter 
resumed the gill-breathing habit, this organ lost 
its original function, and its subsequent history is 
a curious and significant one. In some modern 
fishes it has quite disappeared. In others it exists 
as a minute and useless remnant, no larger than a 
pea. In many it has been converted into the 
swim-bladder, and in this form serves a useful 
purpose, but varies very greatly in shape and size. 
Finally, in a few instances, it retains some meas- 
ure of its probably original function of air-breath- 
ing. It is a fact of much significance, that those 
fishes without a swim-bladder do not seem to be 
at any disadvantage from its absence, but are able 
to make their way vertically through the water 
quite as well as those which possess this organ. 
The presumption, therefore, is that it is of little 
utility to the fish, and that its employment for this 
purpose is a mere resultant of its survival and 
character. Such an organ could never have been 
evolved as an aid in swimming, since its shrink- 
age to a useless rudiment in some cases and 
its complete extinction in others show that this 
function is in no sense a necessary one. It is 
tHrere.andenasslostuits’ old use), and: 1s, inysome 
cases, adapted to another purpose; that is all that 
can be said. 

Man is the one hairless mammal, — or hairless 


14 MAN AND HIS ANCESTOR 


except on a few parts of his body. Yet the whole 
body is covered with a thin growth of hair, useless 
for any purpose of protection, and only explain- 
able as a survival from the mammalian covering. 
The occasional considerable development of the 
hair is an indication pointing to such an origin. 
This applies not only to individuals, but to tribes 
or races, as in the instances of the Ainos of Japan 
and some of the Pygmies of Africa. The disap- 
pearance of the hair in man has been traced to 
no well established cause. Darwin’s view that it 
may have been a result of sexual selection seems 
the most probable explanation. Certainly this is 
the case with the beard, whose absence in women 
shows it to be of no utility, and whose presence in 
man is in accord with the many structures in male 
animals apparently due to this form of selection. 
Darwin has pointed out and explained a very 
curious peculiarity of the hair in man, which is abso- 
lutely inexplicable except on the theory of descent. 
This is the fact that the hairs on man’s arms are 
directed toward the elbow from above and below, 
thus growing in opposite directions on the upper 
and lower arms. The same peculiarity exists in 
the larger anthropoid apes and in some of the gib- 
bons, but is not found in the lower mammals. In 
the apes it is believed to be due to the habit of 
protecting the head from rain by covering it with 
the hands, the hairs turning so that the rain can 
run downward freely in both directions toward 


VESTIGES OF MAN’?S ANCESTRY 15 


the bent elbow. This is so useless in man that it 
can be explained only as a survival. 

There are some other survivals in man of ancient 
structures to which a passing allusion must suffice. 
In man’s eye is a minute membrane, the semilunar 
fold, which is absolutely useless in his economy. 
There is every reason to believe that this is the 
rudiment of a membrane which is fully developed 
in many animals, and is especially useful to birds, 
the nictitating membrane, or third eyelid. Again, 
the muscles which move the skin in many animals, 
especially in horses, have left inactive remnants in 
many parts of the human body. These are nor- 
mally active only in the forehead, where they serve 
to lift the eyebrows, but they occasionally become 
active elsewhere. Thus there are some persons 
who can move the skin of the scalp. Darwin cites 
some who could throw heavy books from the head 
in this manner. The same may be said of the 
rudimentary muscles of the ear. There are per- 
sons who can move their ears in the same way as 
is done by the lower animals. Again, the whole 
external ear may be looked upon as a rudimen- 
tary structure, since it does not appear to aid the 
hearing in man. As regards the pointed ear of 
man’s probable ancestor, Darwin calls attention to 
what seems a trace in man of the lost tip. 

Carrying this consideration farther, it may be 
asked, Of what use are the five toes to man? 
Would not a solid foot have answered the purpose 


16 MAN AND HIS ANCESTOR 


of walking quite as well? But as survivals their 
presence is fully accounted for, since they are in- 
dispensable to many of the lower animals. Ques- 
tion may also be made of the utility of the large 
number of bones in the wrist and heel of man. 
Equal flexibility of the joint could certainly have 
been obtained with a smaller number of bones. It 
is only when these are traced back to their probable 
origin in the walking organs of the fish ancestor 
of the batrachians that their presence becomes ex- 
plainable. They are apparently survivals of a 
very ancient structure, originated for swimming, 
and adapted to walking. 

As regards the wrist of man, a curious predic- 
tion that a certain bone found in some of the 
lower animals, the os centrale, would be found in 
man has been made and verified, it being discov- 
ered as a very small rudiment in the human em- 
bryo. The tail, so common a feature in the lower 
animals, but absent from the higher apes and 
from man, has not vanished without leaving its 
traces. In the human embryo it is plainly indi- 
cated; and while it vanishes in man beyond the 
embryo stage, it is simply hidden beneath the skin, 
where its vertebrze are still apparent, usually three, 
sometimes four or five, in number. In addition to 
this, the muscles which move the tail have left 
traces of their presence, which not infrequently 
develop into true muscles. 

In the human embryo, indeed, we find ourselves 


VESTIGES OF MAN’S ANCESTRY D7, 


in the midst of highly significant indications of 
man’s origin. The body of man passes in its early 
development through a series of stages, in each 
of which it resembles the mature or the embryo 
state of certain animals lower in the stage of exis- 
tenceme ta beens its) existence; as ya ysimplescell. 
analogous in form to the amoeba, one of the lowest 
living creatures, and later assumes the gastrula form 
supposed to have been that of the earliest many- 
celled animals. From this state it progresses by 
successive stages, each of which has some rela- 
tion in form to a lower class. 

The most significant of these is that in which 
the embryo is closely assimilated to the fish, by 
the possession of gill slits. There are four of 
these openings in the neck of the human feetus, 
and they are at times so persistent that children 
have been born with them still open, so that fluids 
taken in at the mouth could trickle out at the 
neck, the opening being sufficient to admit a thin 
probe.! These slits are utilized in the developing 
embryo, one of them being devoted to an impor- 
tant duty, that of conversion into the external and 
middle ear. Thus the opening for hearing is 
an adaptation of what was once an opening for 
breathing. Occasionally an ear-like outgrowth 
appears on the neck, indicative of the attempt of 
a second slit to develop into an ear. The purpose 
of the gill slits is made more apparent by the 


1 Sutton, “ Evolution and Disease.” 


18 MAN AND HIS ANCESTOR 


presence in the embryo of gill arches of the blood- 
vessels, like those normal to the fish. These dis- 
appear in common with the slits. 

The temporary appearance of these gill slits is 
the strongest evidence that could well be demanded 
that the human embryo passes through the various 
stages which the adult has assumed in its long 
development in past time, and that one of these 
stages was the fish. And these form only one 
of the evidences of man’s origin to be found in 
the embryo. Another which may be mentioned 
is the wool-like hair which covers the foetus, and 
whose presence is incomprehensible except on the 
theory of descent. Its most probable explanation 
is that it appears as a passing survival of the first 
permanent coat of hair of the lower mammals. 

In the milk teeth of man we have another use- 
less and often annoying survival of an ancient state 
of the dental organs. We cannot well imagine 
that in any direct creation a set of temporary teeth 
would have been provided as preliminary to a per- 
manent set—-an utterly useless provision. But 
when we find that in a lower stage of animal life 
the old teeth are periodically succeeded by new 
ones, we can understand how a trace of this con- 
dition has persisted in the mammalia. 

Other evidences of man’s origin in the lower 
animals could be drawn from the phenomena of 
atavism, or arrest of development in parts or 
organs of the body. Atavism is usually confined 


VESTIGES OF MAN'S ANCESTRY 19 


within the line of human descent, conditions 
appearing in many of us which belonged to some 
of our human ancestors a few generations, occa- 
sionally many generations, in the past. But con- 
ditions now and then appear which are abnormal 
to man, but which are normal to some of the lower 
animals. This tendency is exhibited by all organ- 
isms. In an occasional horse the long-lost stripes 
of the zebra-like ancestor reappear. Now and 
then a blue pigeon, like the ancestral form, crops 
up in a pure breed of domesticated birds. Even 
in the details of anatomy some _ long-vanished 
character suddenly appears. 

Many instances of this in man might be cited, 
embracing various features of the muscular and 
other internal organs. The abnormality of club- 
foot may be pointed to as a reversion to the shape 
of the foot in the anthropoid apes. This, however, 
is a retention of a condition existing in the foetus of 
man, the foot being drawn up and the sole turned 
inward and upward. It is simply a passing testi- 
mony to the ancestral condition of man. 

Again, we have the fact that man _ possesses 
normally only twelve ribs, one less than is found 
in the gorilla and the chimpanzee. This leads to 
the possibility that man may have lost a rib in his 
development, and in significant evidence of this is 
the fact that occasionally a thirteenth rib appears 
in the human framework. 

The functionless organs in men are, as above 


20 MAN AND AIS ANCESTOR 


said, closely analogous to the fossils in the rocks, 
in that both point back to a period in which they 
were active, vital forms occupying a definite place 
in the long line of animal life or animal structure. 
The argument that God directly created the fossils 
is no more absurd than the one that He directly 
created these useless and at times detrimental 
organs. It is impossible to offer a reason for such 
a futile exercise of creative power, unless that it was 
intended to make it falsely appear that man arose 
from the world of life below him. Will any one in 
this age assert that God placed useless and danger- 
ous structures in the body of man for the incredible 
purpose of deceiving him in regard to his origin? 
And will it be further asserted that the Deity 
placed similar stumbling-blocks to the human 
reason in the embryo, in order to deceive those 
who should extend their researches to this low 
level? It would be difficult to conceive of a more 
preposterous idea, yet there is no other escape 
from what seems a self-evident fact, that man is a 
product of evolution from the lower animals, and 
bears the marks of his ancestry thick upon him. 


II] 
RELICS OF ANCIENT MAN 


IF now, instead of seeking for evidences of man’s 
ancestry within the human body, in survivals of 
ancient anatomical structures, we seek for them 
within the crust of the earth, we find ourselves 
confronted with evidences of a great antiquity of 
the human race, partly in implements of human 
manufacture, partly in ancient or fossilized bones 
of primitive man. These indicate not only great 
remoteness of origin, but also a very gradual ad- 
vance from the lowest stage of inventive ability to 
the high level now attained. 

These relics of primitive man are divided by 
Dana into ten varieties. (1) Buried human bones ; 
(2) stone arrow and lance heads, hatchets, pestles, 
Ctev9(3) tint chips, left. ing the: manufacture. of 
implements; (4) arrow heads and other implements 
made of bone and deer horn; (5) bones, teeth, and 
shells bored or notched by human hands; (6) cut 
or carved wood; (7) bone, horn, ivory, or stone 
graven with figures, or cut into the shapes of ani- 
mals; (8) marrow bones broken longitudinally to 
obtain the marrow for food; (9) fragments of 
charcoal and other indications of the use of fire; 
(10) fragments of pottery. 


21 


22 MAN AND HIS ANCESTOR 


Relics of the kinds above cited have been found 
at intervals for many years past, but their age and 
significance were doubted, and only within some 
forty years has the great antiquity of man upon 
the earth been generally acknowledged by scien- 
tists. The most important early find of ancient 
implements was made by Boucher de Perthes in 
1841 and subsequently, in the high level gravels 
of the valley of the Somme, in Picardy, France. 
In deep layers of these gravels, which were depos- 
ited at a period when the river occupied a wider 
and higher channel than at present, he found rude 
flint weapons and tools, bearing plain evidences of 
human workmanship, and mingled with the teeth 
and bones of animals, both of living and extinct 
species. Among the bones were those of the 
mammoth and the hairy rhinoceros, species evi- 
dently contemporary with man, though they have 
long since vanished from the earth. At a some- 
what earlier date, implements of men, mingled with 
bones of the cave-bear, cave-lion, hyena, and other 
species, had been found in the caves of France 
and Belgium. These were frequently buried be- 
neath deposits of stalagmite and other materials 
that must have taken a long time to accumulate. 

The significance of these discoveries was long 
in forcing itself upon the attention of scientific 
men. Nearly twenty years passed before Boucher 
de Perthes could get the noted geologists of France 
and England to investigate the Somme gravels. 


RELICS OF ANCIENT MAN 23 


When they did so they were quickly convinced of 
the genuine antiquity of these relics, and announced 
it as a fact beyond question that man had lived in 
the Somme valley and fashioned rude implements 
out of flint during what was known as the Quater- 
nary or Drift Period of geology. 

The discoveries here made set men actively at 
work investigating elsewhere. Excavations were 
made in other high level gravels, caverns were 
carefully and minutely examined, Kent’s Cavern, 
England, was dug out to its rock bottom, dozens 
of important finds resulted, and the antiquity of 
man was proved to extend back from thousands to 
tens of thousands, if not to hundreds of thousands, 
of years. And the coexistence of man with the ani- 
mals whose bones accompanied his relics was proved 
by unquestionable evidence, for drawings and carved 
forms of these animals were found, proving incon- 
testably that man had gazed upon their living 
forms. Thus the sketch of a mammoth, showing 
the long hair which served to protect this animal 
from the cold, was found engraved upon a piece 
of mammoth ivory, and one of a group of reindeer 
Ouwam piece. ol. reindeer chorn..)) Lhere )were, also 
drawings of the cave-bear, the seal, etc., and one 
very interesting group showing the aurochs, a 
number of trees, and a man with a snake appar- 
ently biting his heel. The carvings consisted of 
the horn handle of a dagger, cut into the shape of 
a reindeer, and other forms. 


24, MAN AND HIS ANCESTOR 


That these relics belong to a far distant age is 
proved by the strongest evidence. It must suffice 
here to give some of the more striking of these 
proofs of antiquity. The flint hatchets found at 
St. Acheul, France, were obtained from a gravel 
bed which lay below twelve feet of sand and marl. 
On the surface was a layer of soil, in which were 
graves of the Gallo-Roman period, showing that it 
had been there for at least fifteen hundred years. 
The time needed for the slow accumulation of 
the whole series of deposits must have been very 
considerable. 

A much more decisive proof of antiquity is 
given by the position in which this and similar 
gravel beds lie. They are found along the sides 
of rivers at a height often of a hundred or two 
hundred feet above the flood level of the streams. 
When they were deposited, the rivers must have 
run at this elevation, so that time has since elapsed 
sufficient for the streams to cut down their valleys 
to the present depths. The streams may have 
formerly been of greater volume, and had superior 
cutting powers, and they may have been aided 
by the ice of the Glacial Age, yet, however we 
estimate, the conclusion is inevitable that the men 
who dropped their implements into those gravels 
must have lived upon the earth ages before the 
beginning of historical times. 

The presence there of remains of animals which 
ages ago perished from the earth is another cir- 


RELICS OF ANCIENT MAN 25 


cumstance indicative of high antiquity. These 
embrace the mammoth, —the great hairy elephant 
of prehistoric times, —an extinct hair-clad rhinoc- 
eros, the large and powerful cave-bear and cave- 
lion, the great Irish elk, and still other animals of 
whose existence we know only by their bones. 
Others, which existed in common with men of 
later date, are the reindeer and the musk-ox, 
species of which now inhabit the coldest regions 
of the north, and whose presence in southern 
Europe at that era seems to indicate a much colder 
climate than that of historic times. 

The evidences of human antiquity here briefly 
presented are accompanied by indications of a 
gradual development of the human intellect. If 
man has “fallen from his high estate,” he has left 
no traces of this high estate on his downward 
path. We possess abundant indications of his 
upward climb, we find none of a preceding de- 
scent. If we base our opinions on known facts, 
the theory of development is the only one that 
can be sustained; the doctrine of a fall is absolutely 
without warrant outside the pages of Genesis. 

The successive stages of man’s mental develop- 
ment, as indicated in the work of his hands, are 
well and clearly marked. At the lowest level we 
find tools and weapons of the palzeolithic or old 
stone age, made of roughly chipped stone, rude in 
form, and never ground or polished. These pre- 
sent some evidence of gradual improvement, but 


20 MAN AND HIS ANCESTOR 


we must go to a higher level to find implements 
of a decidedly higher order, the neatly shaped and 
polished stone implements of the neolithic or new 
stone age. With the coming of these appears 
a much greater diversity in tools and weapons, 
and evidences of a growing skill in manufacture 
and a considerably greater power of invention. 
Still higher lie the deposits of the bronze age, in 
which metal replaces stone in human implements. 
Finally appears the age of iron, that in which we 
still remain. We need merely refer in passing to 
the lake-dwellings of Switzerland, with their many 
interesting relics of man during the later stone, 
the bronze, and the early iron eras; and the 
kitchen-middens, or refuse-heaps, of the Danish 
islands and elsewhere, which extend from the old 
stone age far down toward the historic period. 
These are but: a-portion of the evidencesman 
man’s antiquity and his gradual progress in the 
arts of manufacture. Others have been found in 
many parts of the earth. Many of them exist in 
America, proving that man resided on this conti- 
nent at a very distant era. When we consider 
that late discoveries in Babylonia appear to carry 
back the age of civilization and historical relics to 
some ten thousand years, and that semi-civilization 
must have extended very considerably beyond that 
time, the vista of man’s gradual progress seems to 
recede interminably and the era of primitive man 
to stretch backward to an enormously remote 


RELICS OF ANCIENT MAN. 27 


period. In truth, discoveries have been made 
which are claimed to carry man back beyond the 
Quaternary and into the Tertiary Period of geology, 
since cut and scratched bones have been found in 
Pliocene deposits, which some geologists of expe- 
rience believe to have been the work of human 
hands. Still more remote are some seemingly 
chipped flints and bones cut in a way that suggests 
human action, which have been found in deposits 
of the very far-distant Miocene Age. The immense 
remoteness of this epoch and the rudeness of the 
work have cast much doubt on the human origin 
of these remains, though their authenticity as the 
work of man has been accepted by several com- 
petent observers, among them the able anthropolo- 
gist, Quatrefages. 

If we confine ourselves, however, to the conclu- 
sions regarding ancient man which are generally 
accepted, we must say that he has not been clearly 
traced back beyond the Glacial Period, though 
some of the relics found in the older river gravels 
and in the lowest cave accumulations may well be 
of pre-glacial age. Many geologists believe that 
he reached Europe as early as the extinct mam- 
mals with which he was contemporaneous there, 
but how far back in time this would carry his 
advent it is impossible to say. 

Coming now to the consideration of more imme- 
diate human relics, the bones of man himself, it 
must be said that well-authenticated remains of 


28 MAN AND HIS ANCESTOR 


paleolithic or early neolithic man are not numer- 
ous. As long as man left his bones to the unaided 
agencies of nature, they were little likely to be pre- 
served. Of the anthropoid apes of Europe, prob- 
ably numerous in individuals, a few remains of one 
or two species alone survive. Of pre-glacial man 
none remain, but this may merely indicate that he 
has shared the fate of numerous other species that 
died out and left no trace. It was only when the 
growing cold drove man from the open woods to 
seek shelter in caves that remnants of his body 
were likely to be preserved, and only when a grow- 
ing sense of human dignity led to the art of sep- 
ulture that the preservation of his bones became 
assured. 

The burial art was seemingly not practised by the 
hunters of the river-drift period or by men of still 
earlier date. The only remains of primitive man 
known are those found in caves and rock shelters. 
A number of human skulls have been discovered in 
these situations, and in a few instances skeletons 
have been exhumed. In the neolithic period inter- 
ment became more common and more carefully 
performed, and the progress of this penodis 
marked by many remains of man, which in later 
times were buried in elaborately constructed stone 
sepulchres, sometimes massive in materials and 
covered by great earth-mounds. 

What is meant by the Glacial Age is probably 
well-known to most readers, but its close relations 


RELICS OF ANCIENT MAN 29 


to ancient man render it important for those who 
are not familiar with its meaning that a passing 
description of it should here be given. It will 
suffice to say that there are found over much of 
the northern portions of America and Europe 
accumulations of clays, sands, and gravels, some- 
times laid down in stratified beds, sometimes rudely 
pulled together. In these occur blocks of stone, 
large and small, and other blocks, occasionally of 
great size, are found in isolated localities. The 
solid rocks which lie beneath these heaps are often 
scratched or polished, as if the material had been 
pushed over them with great force. 

All geologists now believe that these accumula- 
tions were made by ice, at some remote period 
when a very cold climate prevailed in the northern 
hemisphere, and great glaciers slowly made their 
way southward, grinding and rending as they went, 
and burying the land under their mountain-like 
heaps, which sometimes were a mile or more in 
depth. In North America the glacial ice pushed 
southward to the goth degree of north latitude. 
In Europe. it extended to the Alpine region, but 
failed to reach the countries bordering on the 
Mediterranean. 

The elaborate and minute investigation of the 
glacial deposits has made it highly probable that 
there were two glacial eras, two periods in which 
the ice pushed down far to the south, and that 
these were separated by a period in which the ice 


30 MAN AND HIS ANCESTOR 


retreated and an age of warmer weather inter- 
vened. This is known as the interglacial period. 
So far as can be positively ascertained, all the 
authentic relics of man belong to the Glacial Age. 
They seem first to become numerous in the inter- 
glacial period, and continue to increase and _ be- 
come diversified as we descend lower in time. 
How long ago it was that the sea of ice began its 
downflow over the earth it is impossible to say. 
Some place it back six hundred thousand or seven 
hundred thousand years. Some seek to bring it 
down to a quite recent date. It is still so un- 
certain and such a matter of controversy that the 
utmost we are able definitely to say is that it was 
very long ago. 

While there is no positive proof that men dwelt 
in Europe before the coming on of the glacial 
chill, we have no just reason to doubt it. That he 
lived there during glacial times is unquestionable, 
and we may be very well assured that a naked 
tropical animal, destitute of the hairy covering of 
the other animals, would not have chosen that frozen 
period to migrate to the north. The fact that he 
was there during the ice age seems satisfactory ev1- 
dence that he was there before that age, during the 
mild climate of late Tertiary times, and that — for 
a reason which we shall hereafter consider — he 
was caught there and unable to retreat, and was 
forced to adapt himself to the new conditions. 

During the warm preceding period he probably 


RELICS OF ANCIENT MAN 31 


wandered as a hunter through the European for- 
ests. But with the gradual coming on of a wintry 
chill, as the advance of the ice began, shelter of 
some kind became necessary, and he sought refuge 
in caves. From being a forest wanderer he be- 
came a troglodyte. Everywhere in southwestern 
Europe we find traces of this period of man’s exist- 
ence. There is hardly a cave or rock shelter in 
that region within which he has not left his marks. 
He made his way to England, which was probably 
then connected by land with Europe, and dwelt 
long in its caverns. His period of cave residence, 
indeed, appears to have been a very extended one. 
While it continued, deposits many feet in depth 
eradually accumulated on the floors of the caverns, 
slowly filing them up. And that, in some cases 
at least, this cave residence ended a very long 
time ago, we are assured, for since then a great 
thickness of stalagmite, which is deposited with 
extreme slowness, has spread over the lower cave 
deposits and sealed them in. 

It is in these caves that we find, not only the 
rude stone spearheads, scrapers, hammers, etc., 
the bone awls, borers, and other implements of 
paleeolithic man, but the bones of man himself. 
And it is significant of his primitive condition 
that these earliest relics indicate a man of a very 
low grade of development, mentally far above the 
ape, it is true, but mentally and physically much 
below modern man. 


32 MAN AND HIS ANCESTOR 


The most ape-like of those human remains is 
the famous Neanderthal skull, found in 1856 in a 
limestone cavern of the Neanderthal Valley, be- 
tween Diisseldorf and Elberfeld, in Rhenish Prus- 
sia. The relics discovered consist of the brain 
cap, two femori, two humeri, and other fragments. 
The fragment of the skull attracted wide attention 
by its bestial aspect, it presenting a low, narrow 
and receding forehead, and an enormous thickness 
of the bony ridges over the eyes, like that seen 
in the gorilla. This skull, which was associated 
with remains of the cave-bear, hyena, and rhinoc- 
eros, is, with one exception, the most ape-like human 
relic yet found. Yet its cranial capacity is far 
above that of the highest apes, and is assimilated 
with that of Hottentot and Polynesian skulls. 

It has been maintained that this is a pathological 
specimen, and does not represent normal man. 
But this theory has been disproved by the fact that 
other skulls of similar cranial characters are now 
known, indicating that the Neanderthal cranium 
represents a type of man, not an abnormal individ- 
ual. In the Spy Cavern, in the province of Namur, 
Belgium, there were found, in 1886, two nearly 
perfect skeletons of a man and a woman, both of 
them with very prominent eye ridges, low, retreat- 
ing foreheads, and large orbits. This was strikingly 
the case with the woman. The lower jaws in both 
were heavy, while the woman was almost destitute 
of a chin —a marked ape-like characteristic. The 


RELICS OF ANCIENT MAN BR 


tibia was shorter than in any known race and 
stouter than in most. Its curious feature was the 
articulation with the femur, which was such that 
to maintain the equilibrium the head and _ body 
must have been thrown forward, as is the case in 
the anthropoid apes. 

In the cave of Naulette, near Dinant, Belgium, 
has been found the lower jaw of a man of decidedly 
ape-like aspect. Its prognathism or protrusion 
is extreme, and the canine teeth were very strong, 
while the molars were evidently large and increased 
in size backward, a non-human characteristic. At 
iva Denise, in’ the upper Loire, France, have’ been 
found the frontal bones of a man like the Neander- 
thal man in type, the forehead being depressed and 
retreating, and the superciliary ridges large and 
thick. Several other skulls of this general type 
are known, but the above will suffice as examples. 

Remains of palzolithic man of considerably 
higher type are not wanting. In the rock shelter 
of Cro-Magnon, France, were found the bones of 
three men, one woman, and one child, of more 
advanced character. These, however, are of late 
date and may have been early neolithic. At Engis, 
near Liege, Belgium, a deeply buried skull, asso- 
ciated with many remains of extinct animals, has 
been dug up, which is by no means ape-like in 
character. A still superior example of palzeolithic 
man is the skeleton found in a cavern at Mentone, 


east of Nice, France, which represents a man Six 
D 


34 MAN AND HIS ANCESTOR 


feet in height, with rather large head, high fore- 
head, and very large facial angle (85°). The cave 
contained bones of extinct animals, but no trace of 
the reindeer. 

There is no occasion to speak here of the many 
remains of neolithic man that have been exhumed. 
Sparse in the early part of the age of polished 
stone weapons, they gradually became numerous, 
and merged into the human remains of late pre- 
historic. times. The American continent is not 
without its relics of ancient man, the most famous 
of which is the Calaveras skull, found in 1886 in 
the auriferous gravels of Calaveras County, Cali- 
fornia, at an extraordinary depth. The miners, in 
excavating a shaft, passed through several layers 
of lava and gravel, forming a total thickness of 
seventy-nine feet of lava and a considerable thick- 
ness of gravel, making nearly one hundred and 
thirty feet in all. At this depth a skull was 
found imbedded in the gravel, which, if authentic, 
must have been overflowed by several successive 
thick outpours of lava in the ancient volcanic era 
of that region. As its authenticity is, however, 
still a matter of controversy, nothing further need 
here be said about it. 

Leaving these evidences of human antiquity, we 
come to the most remarkable and significant of all 
the known relics of man, if indeed it is man, for it 
seems to many a link between man and the ape, 
—not yet human, while no longer simian. This is 


RELICS OF ANCIENT MAN a5 


the fossil find made by Dr. Eugene Dubois in 
1891 on the banks of the Bengawan River, Java, 
and named by him /2thecanthropus erectus, he 
maintaining that it represents a new genus of 
upright animals, or even a new family. The 
remains found by him consisted of the upper 
part of a skull, a molar tooth, and a femur, pos- 
sibly not belonging to a single individual, as they 
were somewhat separated. These were exhumed 
from a stratum of volcanic tufa, claimed to be of 
Tertiary age, but perhaps Quaternary, and lay at 
a depth of some forty feet beneath the surface. 
The femur very closely resembles that of a human 
being of average size, and its shape, articulating 
surface, and other characters show clearly that the 
animal stood habitually erect. The principal signi- 
ficance lies in the tooth and the cranium. The 
former is like that of the chimpanzee in shape, 
but less rugose on its grinding surface. It seems 
to lie between the ape and the human type of 
dentition. The cranium has a low, depressed 
arch, with a very narrow frontal region and highly 
developed superciliary ridges. The cranial capacity 
was apparently about one thousand, that of man 
being from thirteen hundred to fourteen hundred. 
It is therefore said to be “the lowest human cra- 
nium yet described, very nearly as much below the 
Neanderthal as that is below the normal European.” 
Professor O. C. Marsh, in a paper on the subject 
in the American Journal of Science, for February, 


36 MAN AND HIS ANCESTOR 


1895, agrees with Dr. Dubois in his view of the 
distinct position of this form in the animal king- 
dom, and says that the discoverer “has proved 
the existence of a new prehistoric anthropoid form, 
not human, indeed, but in size, brain power, and 
erect posture much nearer man than any animal 
hitherto discovered, living or extinct.” 

We have here given a short review of a long 
story. The evidences of man’s former existence 
upon the earth are multitudinous, but any extended 
consideration of them is aside from our purpose, 
which is merely to show that the proofs of man’s 
descent found in his physical structure are strength- 
ened by evidences which he has left strewn behind 
him in his long march down the ages. Only a 
single conclusion can be drawn from these ves- 
tiges of man excavated from caves and gravels, 
namely, that they indicate a gradual and steady 
progression upward from a very low condition, 
while they nowhere give evidence of the traditional 
fall of man. 

This is certainly the case with the relics of 
human workmanship. They begin with the rudest 
chipped stones, and very slowly improve in form 
and finish and become more varied, as we move 
upward in our search. The ground and polished 
stones follow, and the variety of implements con- 
siderably increases, until at length the age of 
metal, with its developed industries, is reached. 
The only seeming evidence of superior intellect 


RELICS OF ANCIENT MAN 37; 


to be found in this gradual progress is that of the 
drawings and carvings left us by one group of 
paleolithic men. But the actual mental develop- 
ment indicated by these becomes problematical 
when we consider that similar drawings are made 
to-day by the Bushmen of South Africa, a race of 
men occupying a very low mental stage. From 
this fact we may fairly conclude that the posses- 
sion of a simple graphic art does not necessarily 
indicate any considerable intellectual advance. 

If we consider the remains of man himself, the 
few bones which mark his early pathway through 
time, a similar conclusion must be drawn. Begin- 
ning with Pithecanthropus, which science is yet in 
doubt whether to class with the apes or with men, 
we pass upward to the bestial Neanderthal man 
and his fellows of the same low type. Of the 
sparse remains of palzolithic man that exist, the 
most are of this degraded type. The cranial capac- 
ity is usually not small. They had the full brain 
development of man. But this simply assimilates 
them with the low races of existing savages, many 
of whom have not developed the simple art of 
chipping stone to form weapons and yet have 
brains of normal human weight. 

In truth, the influences under which the develop- 
ment of the brain took place were not what we now 
callintellectual. Developing man used his mental 
powers actively in his dealings with the hostile 
forces of surrounding nature, and nearly all the 


38 MAN AND HIS ANCESTOR 


forces of evolution were brought to bear upon the 
organ of the mind, the body remaining practically 
unchanged. His senses became acute, his cun- 
ning and alertness high, his use of weapons skil- 
ful, but his field of mental exercise was still the 
outer world, and the inner world of thought re- 
mained in its embryo state. The more recent 
development of the mind has been in its intellec- 
tual powers, while its physical aptitudes have some- 
what declined. This has not yielded any marked 
increase in the dimensions of the brain, but it may 
have had a decided effect upon the proportion 
of its parts, the regions of the cerebrum devoted 
to intellectual activity probably increasing at the 
expense of the motor and sensory regions, while 
the convolutions may have grown considerably 
more complicated. 


IV 


FROM QUADRUPED TO BIPED 


In the question which now confronts us, that 
of the evolution of man from the lower world of 
animals, it is necessary first to state in what par- 
ticulars he has evolved, what are the conditions 
which distinguish him from the lower animals. 
Four.marked distinctions may be named : his erect 
attitude, with the freeing of the fore limbs from use 
as agents in locomotion; his employment of natural 
objects, instead of his bodily organs, as tools and 
weapons; his.development of vocal language; and 
his great mental superiority, with the general use 
of the mind in his dealings with nature. 

In none of these particulars does man stand 
quite alone; in all of them an affinity with the 
lower animals exists. Steps of progress in these 
directions have been made by many animals, 
though none of them have gained any consider- 
able advance. In man’s strikingly developed 
social habit and organization he has no close 
counterpart among the vertebrates, but several 
among the insects. And it is of much interest 
to find that in the highest field of man’s progress, 
his employment of the mind in his dealings with 

39 


40 MAN AND HIS ANCESTOR 


nature, he is chiefly emulated by such _ lowly- 
organized creatures as the ants and the bees. 

We do not need to look far among the lower 
animals for the species which come nearest to man 
in structure and which seem to have immediately 
preceded him “in thei line of (descent W casana 
these forms in the monkeys or apes, and especially 
in their highest representatives, the anthropoid 
apes. These possess in a partial degree all the 
special characteristics of man. They are social in 
habit; some of them are semi-erect in posture, and 
their fore limbs partly freed from use in locomo- 
tion; they possess some imperfect means of vocal 
communication; they employ the mind to some 
extent in place of the body; in short, they seem 
arrested forms on the road from brute to man, 
signal-posts on the highway of evolution. In 
physical organization their approach to man is 
singularly close. In anatomy man and the higher 
apes are in most respects counterparts of each 
other. The principal anatomical distinction has 
been considered to be in the foot, which from the 
opposable character of the great toe was classed 
by Cuvier with the hand, the apes being named 
Quadrumana, or four-handed, and man Bimana, or 
two-handed. Fuller research has shown that this 
distinction does not exist, the foot of the ape being 
found to agree far more closely with the foot than 
with the hand of man. Estimated according to 
use, the hand is, in the whole order, the special 


LROM QUADRUPED TO BIPED 41 


prehensile organ; the foot, however prehensile it 
may be, is predominantly a walking organ. And 
the opposability of the great toe is approached in 
some men, who have great mobility in this organ, 
and can use it for grasping. 

In regard to the brain, the organ of the mind, 
the difference between the higher apes and man 
is almost solely one of comparative size, the lower 
intelligence of the apes being indicated by the 
smaller size of their brains. The largest ape 
brain is scarcely half the size of the smallest 
human brain. But anatomically they are nearly 
identical. All the structural features of the brain 
are common to both, and the details are largely 
filled out in the anthropoid apes, the convolutions 
being all present and the pattern of arrangement 
the same. The brain of the orang may be said 
to be like that of man in all respects except size 
and the greater symmetry of its convolutions, 
which are less complicated with minor convolu- 
tions than sim man., In truth, the difference be- 
tween the brains of man and the orang is almost 
insignificant as compared with the difference 
between those of the orang and the lowest apes. 
Mr. E. W. Taylor, who has recently made an 
exhaustive study of the minute anatomy of the 
brain of the chimpanzee, remarks, “The similarity 
between the brain of the anthropoid apes and of 
man is one of the most singular and interesting 
facts of which we have knowledge.” 


42 MAN AND HIS ANCESTOR 


In any attempt, then, to consider the origin of 
man from the point of view of evolution, we are 
irresistibly drawn to the ape tribe as the next 
lower link in the long chain of development, and 
are led to consider the characteristics of the apes 
as the intermediate stage between the quadruped 
and the biped, the bridge crossing this great gulf 
in organic development. This is by no means to 
suggest that some one of the existing anthropoid 
apes is the direct ancestor of man. Such an idea 
has never been entertained by scientists. These 
animals cannot even fairly be considered as 
brothers to man’s ancestor, but must be looked 
upon as more or less distant cousins, with a phys- 
ical organization less favorable to high develop- 
ment than that of man. Man’s ancestry lies much 
farther back in time, and his progenitor must have 
been constituted differently from any of the exist- 
ing large apes. 

In the ape tribe we are able to trace nearly every 
step by which the gulf between quadruped and 
biped has been crossed, from the quadrupedal 
baboon to the nearly erect gibbon. And in seeking 
to follow this development through its successive 
stages, the first point to be considered is how the 
apes gained their special power of grasping, that 
characteristic to which they undoubtedly owe the 
partial freedom of their hands and their tendency 
to assume the erect attitude. 

The most distinguishing characteristic of the 


FROM QUADRUPED TO BIPED A3 


apes and of the nearly related lemurs has not 
hitherto been definitely pointed out. This is that 
they form the only group of strictly arboreal 
animals. The tree is not alone their native habitat, 
but they are specially adapted to it in their organs 
of motion, a fact which cannot be affirmed of any 
other animal group. If we consider, for instance, 
the squirrels, one of the best-known groups of tree- 
living animals, we find them to be members of the 
great order of rodents, whose native habitat is the 
land surface. Though the squirrels have taken to 
the trees, there has been no adaptive change in the 
structure of their limbs and feet. The same may 
be said of almost all tree-dwellers except the lemurs 
and apes. The sloth, indeed, is specially adapted 
in organization to an arboreal residence, but this 
change is individual, not tribal, this animal being 
an aberrant form of the ground-dwelling edentata. 
In the apes and lemurs, on the contrary, the 
ground-dwellers are the aberrant forms, stray 
wanderers from the host. Nearly all the species 
live in trees, to which they are specially adapted 
by the formation of their feet. It remains to 
inquire how this deviation in structure arose, what 
were the steps of development of the grasping foot 
and hand, the special characteristic of this group. 
In considering this question, the first fact to 
appear is that the apes and lemurs are plantigrade 
animals. Their natural tendency is to walk on the 
sole of the foot, a habit which few other tribes of 


44 MAN AND HIS ANCESTOR 


animals possess. Most of the larger animals walk 
on the knuckles or the toes, and develop claws or 
hoofs, but the ancestral form of the ape, ages 
in the past, was doubtless a sole-walking quadruped, 
its toes apparently provided with nails instead of 
claws. What the story of this very ancient quad- 
ruped was we are quite unable to say. It may, 
in the exigencies of existence, have come to a 
parting of the ways; a section of the group, 
drawn by a love of fruit, developing the climbing 
habit; the remaining section continuing on the 
ground and following a separate line of evolution. 
Perhaps only a single species took to the trees; 
for it is quite possible for a single form, in a new 
and advantageous habitat, to vary in time into a 
ereat number of species. 

Of all this we can know nothing: but of one 
thing we may feel assured, which is that the planti- 
grade foot is the only one that could have devel- 
oped into a grasping organ; such a development 
being impossible to the digitigrade or the hoofed 
animals. One can readily see how the habit of 
walking on the sole might tend to a spreading of 
the toes, in order to obtain a wider and firmer 
footing. And it is equally easy to see howa free 
and wide motion in the great toe would aid in this 
result. The animal may have been at first light in 
weight and able to support itself on its unchanged 
foot, but as it increased in size and weight it would 
need a firmer grasp, and the final result of spread- 


FROM QUADRUPED TO BIPED 45 


ing its toes for this purpose may well have been 
the opposable great toe. 

It must be borne in mind, in this consideration, 
that the apes differ from the other tree-dwellers 
in being destitute of claws. The squirrels, the 
opossums, and other arboreal animals have sharp 
claws, by whose aid they can easily cling to the 
surface of the bark-covered boughs. The nails of 
the apes are incapable of affording them this ser- 
vice, and it is not easy to perceive how a foot like 
theirs could become adapted to locomotion in the 
trees otherwise than by the gaining of mobile 
action and grasping power in the toes. 

The existing habits of the ape tribe lead us to 
the conclusion that the ancestral animal may have 
soon begun to seek support from upper limbs. 
The plantigrade foot is one capable of readily 
curving into an organ of support, and in the case 
of the forefoot the toes would tend to spread and 
gain flexibility of motion, and the first toe to become 
opposable to the others and yield a more complete 
grasping power. It does not seem difficult to com- 
prehend, from this point of view, how the feet of a 
five-toed plantigrade animal may in time have de- 
veloped into grasping organs, since there would be 
required only an increased flexibility of the joints, 
and a wider and fuller movement of the great toes. 
That such a change took place in this instance the 
facts appear to indicate, the most simple and prob- 
able explanation of the development of the grasp- 


46 MAN AND HIS ANCESTOR 


ing power in the hands and feet of the ape being 
seemingly that given above. 

The relation of the lemurs to the apes is not 
clearly defined. It may be an ancestral one, or 
the two animals may represent distinct lines of 
descent. In the latter case we would have two 
lines of animal evolution in which the grasping 
power was gained and adaptation to arboreal life 
completed. Whatever their relationship, they both 
possess the opposable thumb as the hall-mark of 
their arboreal habitat, and whenever found walking 
on the ground they may be looked upon as estrays 
from their native place of residence. 

Once the grasping power was gained, the first 
step of change from the quadrupedal to the semi- 
erect attitude was completed. The process may 
have begun in the effort to ft the sole of the foot 
to the rounded surface of boughs; or its first stage 
may have been in the seizing of overhead branches 
with the flexible hand; or both influences may 
have acted simultaneously. We see the result 
only, we cannot trace the exact process; but we 
have as an outcome the adoption of a method of 
locomotion different from that of all other tree- 
dwellers, the forefoot developing into the hand 
with its opposable thumb, and the hindfoot gain- 
ing a similar grasping power in the toes. 

The power of walking on a lower limb and 
grasping an upper one once attained, a succeed- 
ing step in evolution quickly appeared, and one 





FROM QUADRUPED TO BIPED 47 


of prime importance to our inquiry. The animal 
had ceased to be ina full sense a quadruped, while 
not yet a biped, and a variation in the length of 
its limbs was almost sure to take place. This is 
an ordinary result when animals cease to walk on 
all fours. In the leaping kangaroo and jerboa a 
shortening of the arms and lengthening of the 
legs appear. Here the arms are relieved from 
duty and a double duty is laid on the legs, with 
the consequence stated. In the ancient dinosau- 
rian reptiles, upright walkers, the same was the 
case. Those varied from quite small to very large 
animals, but in all known instances the fore limbs 
were greatly reduced in size. A similar condition 
may be seen in the birds, the bones of whose fore- 
limbs have largely aborted from lack of employ- 
ment as walking organs. 

In the case of the apes and lemurs, while a 
similar effect has taken place, an interesting dif- 
ference appears, due to the difference in conditions. 
In these animals the fore limbs are not freed from 
duty as organs of locomotion. In many cases, on 
the contrary, they have an extra duty put upon 
them, with the result that they have grown longer 
instead of shorter. Very likely these animals dif- 
fered considerably in the past, as they do to-day, 
in the degree of use of their legs and arms. Many 
of them walk in the quadruped manner, either on 
the ground or in trees. Others make much use of 
their hands and arms in grasping and swinging, 


48 MAN AND HIS ANCESTOR 


Great differences in the use of the arms and legs 
may have arisen in different species. In some, 
the legs may have been mainly trusted to for sup- 
port, and the hands used for steadying. In others 
the arms may have been the chief locomotive or- 
gans and the feet have given steadiness. Here the 
legs may have grown the longer, there the arms, 
the limbs developing in accordance with their de- 
gree of employment. In the lower monkeys and 
the lemurs, the bones of the pelvis are altogether 
quadrupedal in character. This is not the case in 
the higher forms, and in the highest apes the pel- 
vic bones approach those of man. 

Highly interesting examples of these varied 
results may be seen in the existing anthropoid 
apes. Inall of them it would appear that the arm 
was a prominent factor in locomotion, for in each 
instance it is longer than the leg, —but it differs 
in proportional length in every instance. It is 
shortest in the chimpanzee, somewhat longer in 
the gorilla, still longer in the orang, and remark- 
ably long in the gibbon. In all these instances 
the fact that the arms exceed the legs in length 
indicates that they must have played a large and 
important part in the work of locomotion, and 
especially so in the case of the gibbon. It is well 
known, in fact, that the gibbons progress very 
largely by the aid of their arms, swinging from 
limb to limb and from tree to tree with extraordi- 
nary strength and facility. The legs lend their 


FROM QUADRUPED TO BIPED 49 


aid in this, but the arms are the principal organs 
of motion, and seem to have developed in length 
accordingly, 

As regards the other anthropoid species, Wal- 
lace’s observations on the habits of the orang are 
of interest. This animal usually walks on all fours 
on the branches in a semi-erect crouching attitude, 
but our naturalist saw one moving by the use of 
its arms alone. In passing from tree to tree the 
arms come actively into play. The animal seizes 
a handful of the overlapping boughs of the two 
trees and swings easily across the intervening 
space. While seeming to move very deliberately, 
its actual speed was found to be about six miles an 
hour. 

The organization of man, as he now exists, 
shows an interesting and important deviation from 
that of the manlike apes, and one which serves as 
strong evidence that none of these apes occupied a 
place in his line of descent. This is that he is a 
long-legged and short-armed animal, a condition 
the reverse of that seen in the anthropoid apes. 
While man’s hands reach barely to the middle of 
the thigh, those of the chimpanzee reach below 
the knee, of the gorilla to the middle of the leg, of 
the orang to the ankle, and of the gibbon to the 
ground. All these apes have short legs and long 
arms. Man, on the contrary, has long legs and 
short arms. 


The natural presumption from this interesting 
E | 


50 MAN AND HIS ANCESTOR 


fact is that man’s ancestor, which we may pro- 
visionally call the man-ape, differed essentially in 
its mode of progression from the other apes. The 
smaller forms of these usually move on all fours in 
the trees, though the arms are always ready for a 
swing or a climb. The anthropoid apes also show 
a tendency to a similar mode of progression, 
though with a difference in their mode of walking, 
which, as we shall see later on, is never that of 
the quadruped. As for the man-ape, it may have 
originally walked in the same manner as the re- 
lated species, if we surmise that the variation in 
the length of the limbs was a subsequent develop- 
ment. Certainly after its limbs attained the pro- 
portions of those of man, its facility of swinging 
from tree to tree must have been diminished, while 
it would have found it inconvenient to move in the 
crouching attitude of the orang and its fellows. 
Its easiest attitude must then have been the erect 
one, and its motion a true biped walk, not the 
swinging and jumping movement of the other 
anthropoids. In short, the development of man’s 
ancestor into a short-armed animal, however and 
whenever it took place, could not but have inter- 
fered seriously with its ease of motion in the trees. 
Though this change may have begun in the trees, 
it probably had its full development only after the 
animal made the ground its habitual place of 
residence. 

It is of interest to find that all the existing large 


FROM QUADRUPED TO BIPED 51 


apes are arboreal, the gorilla being the least so, 
probably on account of its weight. Though they 
all descend at times to the ground, their awkward 
motion on the surface shows them to be out of 
their element, while they move with ease and 
rapidity in the trees. The organization of man 
renders it questionable if his primeval ancestor 
was arboreal to any similar extent. The indica- 
tions would seem to be that it made the ground its 
habitual place of residence at an early period in its 
history, and that the result of this new habit and 
of its erect attitude was a change in the relative 
length of its limbs. 

That this animal dwelt mainly in trees in the 
first stage of its existence, and possessed a 
powerful grasping power in its hands, we have 
corroborative evidence in recent studies of child 
life. The human infant, in its earliest days of life, 
displays a remarkable grasping power, being able 
to sustain its weight with its hands for a number 
of seconds, or a minute or more, at an age when 
its other muscles are flabby and powerless. It 
appears in this to repeat a habit normal to the 
ancestral infant, an instinct developed to prevent 
a fall from its home among the boughs. 

Yet it is doubtful if the man-ape long remained 
a specially arboreal animal. The varied length 
of arm in the anthropoid apes was doubtless of 
early origin, and in all probability man’s ancestor 
had originally a shorter arm than its related species. 


52 MAN AND HIS ANCESTOR 


If so, this must have rendered it less agile in trees 
than other forms. If we could see this ancient 
creature in its arboreal home, we should probably 
find it more inclined to stand erect than the other 
apes, walking on a lower limb, and steadying itself 
by grasping an upper limb. This would be a more 
natural and easy mode of progression to a short- 
armed animal than the crouching attitude of the 
orang or the swinging motion of the gibbon, and 
its effect would be to make the erect attitude to a 
large extent habitual with this animal. 

In short, man’s ancestor may have become in 
considerable measure a biped while still largely a 
dweller in the trees, and to that degree set its 
arms free for other duties than that of locomotion. 
Like the other apes, it probably often descended 
to the ground, where its habit of walking erect on 
the boughs rendered the biped walk an easy one, 
or where this habit may have been originally ac- 
quired. While this is conjectural, it is supported 
by facts of organization and existing habit, and for 
the reasons given it seems highly probable that the 
ancestor of man took to a land residence at an 
early period in its history, climbing again for food 
or safety, but dwelling more and more habitually 
on the earth’s surface. Even at this remote era it 
may have become essentially human in organiza- 
tion, its subsequent changes being mainly in brain 
development, and only to a minor extent in physi- 
cal form and structure. 


FROM QUADRUPED TO SIPED 53 


Fossil apes have not been found farther back 
than the Miocene Age of geology. It is quite 
probable, however, that they may yet be found in 
Eocene strata, since examples of their highest 
representatives, the anthropoid or manlike apes, 
have been found in Miocene rocks. The fact that 
these large apes are now few in number of species, 
is no proof that many forms of them may not 
have formerly existed, and among these we may 
class the ancestor of man. 


V 


THE FREEDOM OF THE ARMS 


MAn’s ancestor is by no means the only form of 
ape that has made the earth’s surface its place of 
residence. ‘The baboon is one example of a num- 
ber of forms that dwell habitually upon the ground, 
though they have not lost their agility in climbing. 
But these species have returned to the quadruped 
habit, to which the equal length of their limbs 
adapts them. All the anthropoid apes dwell to 
some extent upon the ground, but these can neither 
be called quadrupeds nor bipeds, their usual mode 
of progression being an awkward compromise 
between the two. The same may be said of one 
of the lemurs, the propithecus, the only member 
of its tribe that attempts to move in the erect atti- 
tude. It does not walk, however, but progresses 
by a series of jumps, its arms being held erect, 
as if for balancing. 

Of the apes, though many can stand upright, 
the gibbon is the only one that attempts to walk 
in this position. . This is a true walk, though not a 
very graceful one. The animal maintains a fairly 
upright posture, but walks with a waddling motion, 
its body rocking from side to side. Its soles are 

54 


THE FREEDOM OF THE ARMS 55 


placed flat on the ground, with the great toes spread 
outward. Its arms either hang loosely by its side, 
are crossed over its head, or are held aloft, sway- 
ing like balancing poles and ready to seize any 
overhead support. Its walk is quickly changed to 
a different motion if any occasion for haste arises. 
At once its long arms are dropped to the ground, 
the knuckles closed, and it progresses by a swing- 
ing or leaping motion, the body remaining nearly 
erect, but being swung between the arms. 

None of the other anthropoid apes ever walk 
erect, though they assume at times the upright 
posture. But though they use all their limbs as 
walking organs, they show no tendency to revert 
to the- habit of the quadrupeds. Their motion is 
like that of the gibbon when in haste, a series of 
jumps or swings between the supporting arms. 
The shortness of their arms, however, prevents 
them from standing erect, like the gibbon, in doing 
this; and they bend forward to a degree depending 
on the length of their arms, the chimpanzee the 
most, the orang the least. 

As arule, the flat sole of the foot is set on the 
ground, with the toes extended, as in man, but the 
toes are sometimes doubled under in walking. 
The orang rarely touches the ground with the sole 
or the closed toes, but walks on the outer edge of 
the foot, the feet being bent inward as if clasping 
the rounded sides of a bough. The other species 
have a tendency in the same direction, the legs 


56 MAN AND HIS ANCESTOR 


being bowed and the gait rolling. In using the 
hands in walking, the closed knuckles are usually 
placed on the ground, though occasionally the 
open palm is employed. The whole movement of 
these animals is strikingly awkward, and goes to 
indicate that there can be no satisfactory compro- 
mise between life in the tree and on the ground. 

The significant fact in these attempts to walk 
is that none of the anthropoid apes show any in- 
clination to revert to the quadruped habit. Their 
attitude is in all cases an approach toward the 
erect one, which posture is attained by the gibbon. 
The arms are used not as walking but as swinging 
organs. Evidently their mode of life in the trees 
has overcome ail tendency toward the quadruped 
motion in these apes and developed a tendency 
toward the biped. But none of them have gained 
the muscular development of the leg known as the 
calf, nor an adjustment of the joints to the erect 
attitude, since none but the gibbon walks erect, 
and it does so only at occasional intervals. 

The conclusion to be derived from all this is that 
the man-ape was in its early days much more truly 
a biped than are any of the species named. Like 
them, it had no tendency to revert to the quadruped 
habit. The shortness of its arms was unsuited to 
this, while rendering it impossible for the animal to 
progress in the semi-erect, swinging fashion of the 
other anthropoid apes. Asa result of its bodily 
formation, it may have begun to walk erect at a 


THE FREEDOM OF THE ARMS 57 


very remote date, with a consequent straightening 
of the joints and muscular development of the legs. 
When this condition was fully attained, it was prac- 
tically a man in physical conformation, though 
mentally still an ape, and with a long develop- 
ment of the brain to pass through before it could 
reach the human level of mind. 

The far-reaching conclusions here reached are 
all based on one important fact, the shortness of 
man’s arms as compared with the disproportionate 
length of arm in the anthropoid apes. This, for 
the reasons given, rendered the adaptation of the 
man-ape to life in the trees inferior to that of the 
long-armed apes; while, as has just been said, it 
unfitted it to walk on the ground either as a quad- 
ruped or in the jumping method of its fellow 
anthropoids. In short, the biped attitude was 
much the best suited to its organization and the 
one it was most likely to assume. This once 
adopted as its habitual posture, efficiency in walk- 
ing would be gained by practice. 

When once this animal became a ground walker, 
its facility of motion in the trees was in a measure 
lost. When the feet became accustomed to the 
flat surface of the ground, they became less capa- 
ble of grasping the rounded surface of the bough. 
Fitness to the one situation entailed loss of fitness 
to the other. The feet of the apes can clasp the 
bough firmly, by curving around its opposite slop- 
ing sides, and to this these animals doubtless owe 


58 MAN AND HIS ANCESTOR 


their bowed legs and their disposition to walk on the 
outer edge of the foot. This disposition the man- 
ape lost as its foot fitted itself to the surface of the 
ground. It was probably retained in a measure 
by the young, after it had been lost by the mature 
form, and is still manifested in the position of the 
foot in the human embryo. 

These considerations bring us to an important 
question: Why did the man-ape gain a length of 
arm not the best suited to its arboreal habitat? 
Why, in fact, do changes in physical structure ever 
take place? How does an animal succeed in pass- 
ing from one mode of life to another, when during 
the transition period it 1s imperfectly adapted to 
either, and therefore at a seeming disadvantage in 
the struggle for existence? The study of animal 
development has given rise to certain difficult 
problems of this character, some of which have 
been solved by showing that the supposed dis- 
advantage did not arise, or that it was balanced 
by some equal advantage. In this way a consider- 
able gap in life conditions has perhaps occasionally 
been crossed. Small gaps have doubtless been fre- 
quently passed over in the same manner. 

In the case of the anthropoid apes, we perceive 
a considerable variation in the length of the arms, 
from the very long arms of the gibbon to the 
comparatively short ones of the chimpanzee. 
These differences are probably the result of some 
difference in their life habits, and accord with the 


THE FREEDOM OF THE ARMS 59 


possibility of a still shorter arm in the man-ape. 
There is, however, some reason to believe, as we 
shall show later on, that the arm of this animal 
was longer and the leg shorter than in man him- 
self, their comparative length perhaps not differ- 
ing greatly from that of the chimpanzee. Aside 
from all other considerations, the use of the legs 
as the sole organs of locomotion could not well 
fail to produce this result, the legs growing longer 
and stronger in consequence of the increased duty 
laid upon them, and the arms growing shorter and 
weaker through their release from duty in loco- 
mouonw | he cascy does “not. differ; in (character 
from those of the dinosauria and the kangaroos, in 
both of which instances a release of the arms from 
duty in walking was followed by a considerable 
decrease in length and strength, while the legs 
grew proportionally stronger. 

If any disadvantage attended the shortening of 
the arms of the man-ape, to the extent that this 
may have taken place in the tree, it was probably 
correlated with some advantage. In the various 
instances of short-armed animals cited this ap- 
pears to have been the case, and it was probably 
so in man’s ancestral form. While the hands con- 
tinued useful in grasping and enabling the animal 
to maintain its place on the boughs, they may 
have been gradually diverted to some other service, 
with the result that the animal found the tree less 
desirable than before as a place of residence and 


60 MAN AND HIS ANCESTOR 


sought the ground instead. This would be particu- 
larly the case if the new duty was one best exercised 
upon the ground. 

Shall we offer a suggestion as to this new use? 
Such changes are usually the result of some change 
of habit in the animal, frequently one that has to 
do with its food. Change of diet or of the mode 
of obtaining food is the most potent influencing 
cause of change of habit in animals, and the one 
that first calls for consideration. 

The apes are frugivorous animals, though not 
exclusively so. Carnivorous tendencies are dis- 
played by many of them. They rob birds’ nests 
of their eggs and young, they capture and devour 
snakes and other small animals. In zodlogical 
gardens monkeys are often observed to catch and 
eat mice. It is evident that many of them might 
readily become carnivorous to a large extent under 
suitable conditions. The large apes are usually 
frugivorous, but some of them eat animal food. 
This is the case with both the chimpanzee and the 
gorilla. The latter, while living usually on fruit 
and often making havoc in the sugar-cane planta- 
tions and rice-fields of the natives, also eats birds 
and their eggs, small mammals and reptiles, and 
is said to devour large animals when found dead, 
though it does not attempt to kill them for food. 
The young gorilla which was kept in captivity at 
Berlin became quite omnivorous in its diet. 

With all this readiness to eat animal food, none 


THE FREEDOM OF THE ARMS opi 


of the existing apes are carnivorous to any large 
extent, but the fact of this inclination makes it 
not improbable that some of the apes of the past 
may have been much more so. It is quite within 
the limits of probability, for instance, that the man- 
ape at an early date became omnivorous in its diet. 
Its change in structure may well have been the 
result of a decided change in diet, such as that 
from fruit to flesh food. Such a radical change 
as that from vegetable to animal food would cer- 
tainly demand a more active employment of the 
arms as agents in capture. Fruits and nuts wait 
to be pulled; animals must be caught before they 
can be eaten. The former is an easy matter to an 
arboreal animal; the latter might prove a difficult 
one, especially if large animals were to be captured. 

In short, the pursuit and capture of any of the 
larger animals for prey could not fail to modify to a 
ereat degree the use of the arms. Their employ- 
ment in locomotion would interfere seriously with 
their utility in this direction. To succeed in captur- 
ing nimble prey by an animal with the ape form of 
hands a considerable freedom of the arms would be 
necessary, and the feet would have to be mainly, if 
not wholly, depended upon for motion. The ape has 
not the sharp claws of the carnivora with which to 
seize and holdits prey. It must have been obliged 
to use its palms for this purpose, and this it could 
not well have done unless they were free in their 
action. 


62 MAN AND HIS ANCESTOR 


It is conceivable, indeed, that the man-ape may 
have run down its prey, or sprung upon it from 
covert, and seized it with the hands, but there is 
good reason to believe that this was not its mode 
of capture. The organization of the ape tribe 
gives it a characteristic action which is not to be 
found in any other group of the vast animal king- 
dom, that of handling and throwing missiles. In 
this it necessarily stands alone, since no other ani- 
mal has a grasping palm. The power is one of 
prime importance, for without it we cannot per- 
ceive how man could ever have emerged from the 
general animal kingdom. The use of missiles is by 
no means uncommon with the monkeys. We can- 
not safely accept the story that American monkeys 
will throw cocoanuts from tree-tops at those who 
hurl stones at them from below, from the fact that 
the cocoanut seems too heavy and too firmly fixed 
to its support for the strength of those small species, 
but it is not uncommon for them to throw lighter 
objects. Yet in doing this they usually seem to 
have no idea of aim, but toss the missile aimlessly 
into the air. Of the large apes, the orang will 
break off branches and fling them at its tormen- 
tors, or will throw the thick husks of the durian 
fruit, but with similar lack of aim. The most skilful 
in this exercise are some species of baboons, which 
can hurl branches, stones, or hard clods with much 
dexterity. 

It is of interest to find existing apes availing 


THE FREEDOM OF THE ARMS 63 


themselves of their grasping power in this manner, 
since it leads us irresistibly to the conclusion that 
the man-ape may have done the same thing. The 
species which use missiles fail to take aim for two 
reasons, one that they employ them only occasion- 
ally, often in imitation of human action, the other 
that their arms are ill suited to this motion from 
their constant employment in another duty. In the 
case of the man-ape we may justly look for a more 
effective result, since if the arms became relieved 
from duty in locomotion they were free to gain 
facility of action in other directions. 

If in addition to this the man-ape began to use 
missiles with a definite purpose in view, that of 
striking down animal prey, so that the use of such 
weapons became habitual instead of occasional, it 
would soon gain some power of aim and a growing 
strength and skill in the throwing motion. It is 
quite probable, also, that an early use of weapons 
was in the form of clubs, which were retained in 
the grasp to strike down the prey when overtaken. 
In this case, we may imagine our primitive biped 
running swiftly after its prey, club in hand, strik- 
ing at it when within reach; or, if it should prove 
too swift, hurling the club or a stone through the 
air with the hope of bringing it down in this 
manner. Such a flinging action, if now and then 
successful, would be likely soon to become habitual ; 
while the arm would grow accustomed to this new 
motion, and attain skill in taking aim. We may 


64 MAN AND HIS ANCESTOR 


reasonably infer, also, that the club would be used 
for defence as well as for offence, in case the man- 
ape were in its turn pursued by larger animals. 
Instead of fleeing to the nearest tree, it might now 
stand its ground and beat off its enemy. 

All must admit the probability, in a large tribe 
of animals with grasping power in their hands, and 
in the habit of using missiles occasionally, of one 
or more species coming to use them habitually. 
All the anthropoid apes are certainly intelligent 
enough to do this, if it should prove advantageous 
to them. Its principal advantage, however, would 
seem to be to a species that became largely carniv- 
orous and needed to capture running or flying 
prey. 

The habit of using implements is one of supreme 
importance in animal evolution. To it we owe 
man as he exists to-day. While animals confined 
themselves to their natural weapons of teeth and 
claws, their development must have remained a 
very slow one and been confined within narrow 
limits. When they once began to add to their 
natural powers those of surrounding nature, by the 
use of artificial weapons, the first step in a new and 
illimitable range of evolution was taken. From 
that day to this, man has been occupied in unfold- 
ing this method, and has advanced enormously 
beyond his primal state. A crude and simple use 
of weapons gave him, in time, supremacy over all 
the lower animals. An advanced use of weapons 


THE FREEDOM OF THE ARMS 65 


and tools has given him, in a measure, supremacy 
over nature herself, and raised him to a stage 
almost infinitely beyond that of the animal which 
trusts solely to teeth and claws. 

So far as we know, only one of the innumerable 
species of animals attained this development; un- 
less, indeed, the various races of men had more 
than one ape ancestor. For the appearance of man 
there became necessary, first, the development of 
an order of animals with power of grasp in their 
hands; and, second, the development of one or 
more biped species, with hands freed from duty 
as walking organs and capable of use in other 
directions. A third necessity was very probably 
the exchange of the frugivorous for the carnivorous 
habit, which would act as a predisposing agency 
in inducing the animal to desert the tree for the 
ground, and to employ weapons in the chase. The 
final result of all this would be an erect, walking, 
and running animal, with arms and hands quite 
free from their old duty, except during an occa- 
sional return to the tree, and with the necessary 
straightening of joints and development of sup- 
porting muscles. 

What has been advanced above is, no doubt, 
largely a series of assumptions and conjectures, 
few of which are sustained by known facts. But as 
the matter stands, no other method of dealing with 
it can be adopted, since the facts in the case have 


in great part vanished. What we know positively 
F 


66 MAN AND HIS ANCESTOR 


is that man exists, and that in physical structure 
he is very closely related to the anthropoid apes. 
What we have excellent reason to feel assured of 
is that man has descended from the lower animals, 
and in all probability from an ape-like ancestor. 
We know that one or more species of anthropoid 
apes have become extinct, and can reasonably con- 
jecture that one ancient species became modified 
into the form of man. We know that human 
remains have been found that, to some small extent, 
fill the gap between man and theape. Correlative 
evidence exists in the variations in length of 
limb in the existing anthropoids, their efforts to 
walk upright, their varied degree of dependence 
upon the arms for locomotion, and the occasional 
use of missiles by these and lower forms. To 
these may be added the carnivorous tastes shown 
by many members of the ape family, with the indi- 
cation that more decided carnivorous habits might 
readily be assumed. 

Taking the stand that such a partly carnivorous 
anthropoid ape, biped in structure, appeared and 
made the ground its usual place of residence, we 
find ourselves on the direct trail of man. Long 
ago as this may have been, and far and difficult 
as was the journey to be made, the way was 
thenceforth straight and well-defined. Such an 
animal, living largely on animal food, and using 
weapons superior to its natural ones in the capture 
of prey, was essentially a man, however low may 


THE FREEDOM OF THE ARMS 67 


still have been its level of intelligence. Its feet 
were firmly fixed upon the upward track, and only 
time and stress of circumstance were needed to 
carry it upward to the high level of civilized man. 

We may, indeed, go further than this. We are 
in a measure justified in saying what this man-ape 
was like, this creature which had left its early 
home in the trees and began to walk upright upon 
the earth, pursuing the larger animals and captur- 
ing them for food. It was probably much smaller 
than existing man, little if any more than four feet 
in height and not more than half the weight of 
man. Its body was covered, though not profusely, 
with hair, the hair of the head being woolly or 
frizzly in texture, and the face provided with a 
beard. The complexion was not jet black, like 
the typical negro, but of a dull brown hue, the 
hair being somewhat similar in color. The arms 
were lank and rather long, the back much curved, 
the chest flat and narrow, the abdomen protruding, 
the legs rather short and bowed, the walk a wad- 
dling motion, somewhat like that of the gibbon. 
It had small, deep-set eyes, greatly protruding 
mouth with gaping lips, huge ears, and in general 
a very ape-like aspect. Our warrant for this de- 
scription of man’s ancestor must be left for a later 
portion of our work. We shall only say here that 
it is based on known fact, not on fancy. 


VI 


THE DEVELOPMENT OF INTELLIGENCE 


THE full adoption of the erect attitude gave the 
ancestor of man an immense motor supremacy 
over the lower animals, for it completely released 
his fore limbs from duty as organs of support and 
set them free for new and superior purposes. In 
all the animal kingdom below man there exists 
but a single form that emulates him in this posses- 
sion of a grasping organ which takes no part in 
walking or in other modes of locomotion. This 
is the elephant, whose nose and upper lip have 
developed into an enormous and highly flexible 
trunk, with delicate grasping powers. The pos- 
session of this organ may have had much to do 
with the intellectual acumen of the elephant. Yet 
it is far inferior in its powers to the arm and 
hand of man; while the form, size, and food of 
the elephant stand in the way of the progress 
which might have been made by an animal pos- 
sessed of such an organ in connection with a better 
suited bodily structure. 

For a period of many millions of years the 
world of vertebrate life continued quadrupedal, or 


where a variation from this structure took place 
68 


THE DEVELOPMENT OF INTELLIGENCE 69 


the fore limbs remained to a large extent organs of 
locomotion. Finally a true biped appeared. For 
a period of equal duration the mental progress of 
animals was exceedingly slow. Then, with almost 
startling suddenness, a highly intellectual animal 
appeared. Thus the coming of man indicated, in 
two directions, an extraordinary deviation from the 
ordinary course of animal development. Both 
physically and mentally evolution seemed to take 
an enormous leap, instead of proceeding by its 
usual minute steps, and in the advent of man we 
have a phenomenon remarkable alike in the de- 
velopment of the body and the mind. 

So far our attention has been directed to the 
evolution of the human body, now we must con- 
sider that of the human mind. In seeking through 
the animal kingdom for the probable ancestor of 
man in his bodily aspect, we were drawn irre- 
sistibly to the ape tribe, as the only one that made 
any near approach to him in structure. In con- 
sidering the case from the point of view of mental 
development we find a similar irresistible drawing 
toward the apes, as the most spontaneously intelli- 
gent of the mammalia. While many of the lower 
animals are capable of being taught, the ape 
stands nearly alone in the power of thinking for 
itself, the characteristic of self-education. 

Innumerable testimonials could be quoted from 
observers in evidence of the superior mental pow- 
ers of the apes. Hartmann says of them that 


70 MAN AND AIS ANCESTOR 


“their intelligence sets them high above other 
mammals,” and Romanes that they “certainly sur- 
pass all other animals in the scope of their rational 
faculty.” It is scarcely necessary here to give 
extended examples of ape intelligence. Hundreds 
of instances are on record, many of them showing 
remarkable powers of reasoning for one of the 
lower animals. The ape, it is true, is not alone 
in its teachableness. Nearly all the domestic ani- 
mals can be taught, the dog and the elephant to 
a considerable degree. And evidences of reason- 
ing out some subject for themselves now and then 
appear in the domesticated species; but these are 
rare instances, not frequent acts as in the case of 
the apes. 

The apes, indeed, rarely need teaching. They 
observe and imitate to an extent far beyond that 
displayed by any others of the lower animals, and 
the more remarkable from the fact that in nearly 
every instance the animals concerned began life 
in the wild state, and had none of the advantages 
of hereditary influence possessed by the domesti- 
cated dog and horse. Among the most interesting 
examples of spontaneous acts of intelligence of the 
ape tribe are those related by Romanes, in his 
“Animal Intelligence,” of the doings of a cebus 
monkey, which he kept for several months under 
close observation in his own house. Instead of 
selecting general examples of ape actions, we may 
cite some of the doings of this intelligent creature. 


PHE DEVELOPMENL OF INTHELIGENCE 7% 


The cebus did not wait to be shown how to do 
things, but was an adept in devising ways to do 
them himself. He had the monkey love of mis- 
chief well developed, and not much that was 
breakable came whole from his hands. When he 
could not break an egg cup by dashing it to the 
ground, he hammered it on the post of a brass 
bedstead until it was in fragments. In breaking 
a stick, he would pass it down between a heavy 
object and the wall, and break it by hanging on 
its end. In destroying an article of dress, he would 
begin by carefully pulling out the threads, and 
afterward tear it to pieces with his teeth. His 
nuts he broke with a hammer precisely as a 
man would have done and without being shown 
its use. Ridicule was not pleasant to him; he 
strongly resented being laughed at, and would 
throw anything within reach at his tormentor and 
with a skill and force not usual with monkeys. 
Taking the missile in both hands and standing 
erect, he would extend his long arms behind his 
back and hurl the article by bringing them forcibly 
forward. 

If any object he wanted was too far away to 
reach, he would draw it toward him with a stick. 
Failing in this, he was observed to throw a shawl 
back over his head, and then fling it forward with 
all his strength, holding it by two corners. When 
it fell over the object, he brought this within reach 
by drawing in the shawl. In his gyrations, the 


72 MAN AND HIS ANCESTOR 


chain by which he was fastened often became 
twisted around some object. He would now exam- 
ine it intently, pulling it in opposite ways with his 
fingers until he had discovered how the turns ran. 
This done, he would carefully reverse his motions 
until the chain was quite disentangled. 

The most striking act of intelligence told of this 
creature was his dealings with a hearth-brush which 
fell into his hands, and of which the handle screwed 
into the brush. It took him no long time to find 
out how to unscrew the handle. When this was 
achieved, he at once began to try and screw it in 
again. In doing so he showed great ingenuity. 
At first he put the wrong end of the handle into 
the hole, and turned it round and round in the 
right direction for screwing. Finding this would 
not work, he took it out and tried the other end, 
always turning in the right direction. It was a 
difficult feat to perform, as he had to turn the 
screw with both hands, while the flexible bristles 
of the brush prevented it from remaining steady. 
To aid his operations he now held the brush with 
one foot, while turning with both hands. It was 
still difficult to make the first turn of the screw, 
but he worked on with untiring perseverance until 
he got the thread to catch, and then screwed it in 
to the end. The remarkable thing was that he 
never tried to turn the handle in the wrong direc- 
tion, but always screwed it from left to right, as if 
he knew that he must reverse the original motion. 


THE DEVELOPMENT OF INTELLIGENCE. 73 


The feat accomplished, he repeated it, and con- 
tinued to do so until he could perform it easily. 
Then he threw the brush aside, apparently taking 
no more interest in that over which he had worked 
so persistently. No man could have devoted him- 
self more earnestly to learn some new art, and 
become more indifferent to it when once learned. 
These are a few only of the many acts of intelli- 
gence observed by Mr. Romanes in the doings of 
this animal. They will suffice as examples of 
what we mean by spontaneous intelligence. The 
cebus did not need to be shown how to do things; 
it worked them out for itself much as a man would 
have done, performing acts of an intricacy far 
beyond any ever observed in other classes of ani- 
mals in captivity. It may be said further that 
the displays of spontaneous intelligence shown by 
dogs, cats, and similar animals have usually been 
intended in some way for the advantage of the ani- 
mal; few or none are on record which indicate a 
mere desire to know without ulterior advantage; 
no persevering effort, like that with the brush, 
which is purely an instance of self-instruction. 
Examples of intelligence of this advanced char- 
acter could be cited from observation of monkeys 
of various species. The anthropoid apes have not 
been brought to any large extent under observa- 
tion, but are notable for their intelligence in cap- 
tivity. It is not easy to observe them in a state 
of nature, and nearly all we know is that the orang 


74 MAN AND HIS ANCESTOR 


makes itself a nightly bed of branches broken off 
and carefully laid together, and is said to cover 
itself in bed with large leaves, if the weather is 
wet. The chimpanzee has a similar habit, and 
the gorilla is said to build itself a nest in which 
the female and the young sleep, the old male rest- 
ing at the foot of the tree, on guard against their 
dangerous foe, the leopard. 

It is the young animals of these. species which 
are the most social and docile and most approach 
man in appearance. As they grow older, their 
specific characters become more marked. Fierce 
and sullen as is the old gorilla, the young of this 
species is playful and affectionate in captivity and 
is given to mischievous tricks. The one that was 
kept for a time in Berlin showed much good-nature, 
playfulness, and intelligence, and some degree of 
monkey mischievousness. It was very cunning in 
carrying out its plans, particularly in stealing sugar, 
of which it was very fond. 

The chief examples of anthropoid intelligence 
are told of the chimpanzee, which has been most 
frequently kept in captivity. It is usually lively 
and good-tempered and is very teachable. Some of 
the stories of its intelligence may be apocryphal, as 
those told by Captain Grandpré of a chimpanzee 
which performed all the duties of a sailor on board 
ship, and of one that would heat the oven for a 
baker and inform him when it was of the right 
temperature. But there are authenticated stories 


THE DEVELOPMENT OF INTELLIGENCE 75 


of chimpanzee intelligence which give it a high 
standing in this respect among the lower animals. 

The emotional nature of the ape is also highly 
developed. It displays an affection equal to that 
of the dog, and a sympathy surpassing that of any 
other animal below man. The feeling displayed 
by monkeys for others of their kind in pain is of 
the most affecting nature, and Brehm relates that 
in the monkeys of certain species kept under con- 
finement by him in Africa, the grief of the females 
for the loss of their young was so intense as to 
cause their death. More than once an ardent 
hunter has seen such examples of tender solicitude 
among monkeys for the wounded and of grief for 
the dead as to resolve never to fire at one of the 
race again. 

James Forbes, in his “ Oriental Memoirs,” relates 
a striking instance of this kind. One of a shooting 
party had killed a female monkey in a banian tree, 
and carried it to his tent. Forty or fifty of the 
tribe soon gathered around the tent, chattering 
furiously and threatening an attack, from which 
they were only diverted by the display of the 
fowling-piece, whose effects they seemed perfectly 
to understand. But while the others retreated, the 
leader of the troop stood his ground, continuing his 
threatening chatter. Finding this of no avail, he 
came to the door of the tent, moaning sadly, and 
by his gestures seeming to beg for the dead body. 
When it was given, he took it sorrowfully up in his 


76 MAN AND HIS ANCESTOR 


arms and carried it away to the waiting troop. That 
hunter never shot a monkey again. 

This deep feeling for the dead is probably not 
common among monkeys. The gibbon, for instance, 
is said to take no-notice of the dead. It is, however, 
highly sympathetic to injured and sick companions, 
and this feeling seems common to all the apes. 
No human being could show more tender care of 
wounded or helpless companions than has often 
been seen in members of this affectionate tribe of » 
animals. 

Without giving further examples of the intelli- 
gence and sympathy of the apes, we may say that 
they possess in a marked degree the mental powers 
to which man owes so much, viz. observation and 
imitation. The ape is the most curious of the 
lower animals—that is, it possesses the faculty 
of observation in an unusual degree. What we 
call curiosity in the ape is the basic form of the 
characteristic which we call attention or observa- 
tion in man. Its seeming great activity in the ape 
is what might naturally be expected in an observant 
animal when removed from its natural habitat toa 
location where all around it is new and strange. 
Man under like circumstances is as curious as the 
ape, while the latter in its native trees probably 
finds little to excite its special attention. In both 
man and the ape it needs novelty to excite curiosity. 

Again, the ape is imitative in a high degree. 
This faculty also it does not share with the lower 


THE DEVELOPMENT OF INTELLIGENCE 177 


animals, but does with man, imitation being one 
of the methods by which he has attained his 
supremacy. Observation, imitation, education, are 
the three levers in the development of the human 
intellect. The first two of these the ape possesses 
in a marked degree. It is susceptible also to the 
last, being very teachable. Education certainly 
exists to some extent among the apes in their 
natural habitat, perhaps to as great an extent as 
itexiid sinepimitivesman. In the latter ‘case ut is 
doubtful if there was much that could be called 
designed education, the young gaining their 
degree of knowledge by observing and imitating 
their elders. The same is certainly the case 
among the apes. 

We may reasonably ask what there is in the 
life and character of the apes to give them this 
mental superiority over the remaining lower ani- 
mals. It is certainly not due to the arboreal life 
and powers of grasp of these animals, for in those 
respects they resemble the lemurs, which are 
greatly lacking in intelligence. Whether the mon- 
keys emerged from the lemurs or the two groups 
developed side by side is a question as yet unsettled; 
at all events they are closely similar in conditions of 
existence. Yet while the monkeys are the most in- 
telligent and teachable of animals, the lemurs are 
among the least intelligent of the mammalia. There 
is here a marked distinction which is evidently not 
due to difference of structure or habitat, and must 


78 MAN AND HIS ANCESTOR 


have its origin in some other characteristic, such as 
difference in life habits. 

There is certainly nothing in the diet of the ape 
to develop intelligence. The frugivorous and her- 
bivorous animals.do not need cunning and shrewd- 
ness to anything like the extent necessary in 
carnivorous animals. They do not need to pursue 
or lie in wait for prey; and they escape from their 
enemies mainly through strength, speed, conceal- 
ment, or other physical powers or methods. Es- 
cape may occasionally develop mental alertness, 
but does not usually do so. Certainly if the alert, 
watchful, suspicious habits of the apes are due to 
the requisite of avoiding dangerous enemies, we 
might naturally look for similar habits in the 
lemurs, which are similarly situated. And if we 
consider the wide distribution of the apes through- 
out the tropics of both hemispheres, and their great 
diversity in species and condition, it seems very 
unlikely that in all these localities their relations 
with other animals would be such as to develop 
the mental alertness which they so generally dis- 
play. The fact appears to be that, while this may 
be a cause, it is not a leading cause, of mental 
development in animals, and that we must seek 
elsewhere for the origin of animal intelligence. 

Research, indeed, leads us to examples of intel- 
ligence where we should least expect to find it. 
Among the mammalia we perceive one marked 
example in the beavers, the only one in the great 


THE DEVELOPMENT OF INTELLIGENCE 79 


class of the rodents, with their nine hundred or 
more of species. But we must go still lower, to 
the insects, for the most striking examples, finding 
them alone in the ants, the bees, and the termites, 
among the vast multitude of insect forms. Less 
marked instances appear in the elephants, in some 
of the birds, and in certain other gregarious animals. 

From these examples, and what is elsewhere 
known of animal intelligence, one broad conclu- 
sion may be drawn, that all the strikingly intelli- 
gent animals are strongly social in their habits, 
and that no decided display of intelligence is to be 
found among solitary species. This conclusion 
becomes almost a demonstration in the case of the 
ants and bees. The ants, for instance, comprise 
hundreds of species, spread over most of the 
world, mainly social, but occasionally solitary. 
The social species, while varying greatly in habit, 
all display powers of intelligence, and these so 
diversified as to indicate many separate lines of 
evolution. The solitary ants, on the contrary, 
manifest no special intelligence, and do not rise 
above the general insect level. The same may be 
said of the bees. The hive bee, the most com- 
munal in habit, shows the highest traits of intelli- 
gent activity. The bees which form smaller groups 
and the social wasps stand at a lower level, and the 
solitary bees and wasps sink to the ordinary insect 
plane. We arrive at like conclusions from obser- 
vation of the social termites, or white ants, some 


SOmie MAN AND HIS ANCESTOR 


species of which are remarkable for their intelli- 
gent codperation and division of duties. 

Examples similar in kind may be drawn from 
the vertebrates. Among the birds there are none 
more quick-witted than the social crows, none with 
less display of intelligence than the solitary car- 
nivorous species. Birds are rather gregarious than 
social. There are few species whose association 
is above that of mere aggregation in flight. Those 
more distinctively social usually have special habits 
which indicate intelligence —as in the often cited 
instances of their seemingly trying and executing 
delinquents. Among the carnivorous mammals 
the social dog or wolf tribe displays the intelligent 
habit of mutual aid. The horses, oxen, deer, and 
other gregarious hoofed animals have a degree of 
division of duties, but their intelligence is of a 
lower grade than that of the dogs and the ele- 
phants. On the whole, it may be affirmed that 
the social habit is frequently accompanied by 
instances of special intelligence to which we find 
no counterpart among the solitary forms, and that 
the highest manifestations of intelligence in the 
lower animals are found in those forms which pos- 
sess communal habits, as the ants, bees, termites, 
and beavers. 

One important characteristic of the communal 
animals is that they become mentally specialized. 
They round up their powers, build barriers of 
habit over which they cannot pass, perform the 


THE DEVELOPMENT OF INTELLIGENCE 81 


same acts with such interminable iteration that 
what began as intellect sinks back into instinct. 
Each individual has fixed duties and is confined 
within a limited circle of acts, whose scope it cannot 
pass, or only to the minutest extent. 

The non-communal social animals, on the con- 
trary, are not thus restricted. Their intelligence 
is of a generalized character, and is capable of 
developing in new channels. None are tied down 
to special duties, each possesses the full powers 
of all, and they are thus more open to a continued 
growth of the intellect than the communal forms. 
To this class belongs the ape. Its intelligence is 
general, not special; broadly capable of develop- 
ment, not narrowed and bound in by the limitation 
of certain fixed and special duties. 

The suggestions above offered point to three 
grades of community among animals, which may 
be designated the communal, the social, and the 
solitary. Among these there are, of course, many 
stages of transition from one to the other. The 
specially communal, including the ants, bees, ter- 
mites, and beavers, are those in which there is 
almost a total loss of individuality, each member 
working for the good of the community as a unit, 
not for its personal advantage. The result con- 
sists in organized industries, division and special- 
ization of duties, a common home, food stock, etc. 
At a lower level in animal life, that of the hydroid 


polyps, communism has become so complete that 
G 


BZ MAN AND HIS ANCESTOR 


the community has grown into an actual individual, 
the members not being free, but acting as organs 
of an aggregate mass, in which each performs some 
special duty for the good of the community. 

The social animals differ from the communal in 
that the individuality of the members is fully pre- 
served. There is some measure of work for the 
group, some degree of mutual aid, some evidence 
of leadership and subordination, but these are con- 
fined to a few exigencies of life, while in most of 
the details of existence each member of the group 
acts for itself. The solitary animals are those 
which do not form groups larger than that of the 
family, and into whose life the principle of mutual 
aid, outside the immediate family relations, does 
not enter. Each acts for itself alone, and inter- 
course between the individuals of the species is 
greatly restricted. 

The advantages of social habits among animals 
are evident. There is excellent reason to believe 
that all animals, and especially such advanced 
forms as the vertebrates and the higher arthro- 
pods, have some power of mental development, 
some facility in devising new methods of action to 
meet new situations. Though their reasoning 
power may be small, it is not quite lacking, and 
many examples of the exercise of the faculty of 
thought could be cited if necessary. 

What we are here concerned with, is the final 
result of such exercises of individual thought 


THE DEVELOPMENT OF INTELLIGENCE |. 82 


powers. In the case of the solitary forms, such 
new conceptions die with the individual. Though 
they may exert an influence on the development 
of the nervous system, and aid in the hereditary 
transmission of more active brain powers, they 
are lost as special ideas, fail to be taken up and 
repeated by other members of the species. This 
is not the case with the social animals. Each of 
these has some faculty of observation and some 
tendency to imitation, and useful steps of advance 
made by individuals are likely to be observed and 
retained as general habits of the community. 
Anything of importance that is gained may be 
preserved by educative influences. The facility of 
mental communication between these creatures is 
perhaps much greater than is generally supposed, 
and acts of importance which are not directly 
observed might in many cases be transmitted 
through repetition for the benefit of the group. 
We know this to be the main agency in human 
progress. New ideas are of rare occurrence with 
man. Ideas of permanent value do not occur to 
one per cent., perhaps not to one hundredth of one 
per cent., of civilized mankind, yet few of such 
ideas are lost, and that which has proved of ad- 
vantage to an individual soon becomes the com- 
mon possession of a community. 

Among the lower animals new and advantageous 
ideas are probably of exceedingly rare occurrence. 
When they do occur, their advantage to solitary 


84 MAN AND HIS ANCESTOR 


forms is very slight, being that of minute steps of 
brain development and hereditary transmission of 
the same. To social forms they are doubly advan- 
tageous, since, while they tend to brain develop- 
ment, they may also be preserved in their original 
form, and transmitted directly to members of the 
group. They are still more advantageous to the 
communal animals, from the closer intercourse of 
these, and their constant association in acts of 
mutual aid. But in the latter instance their influ- 
ence is usually exerted for the benefit of the com- 
munity as a unit, while in the case of social animals 
it is of advantage to the individual. 

The result of such a process of evolution in the 
case of the communal animals is a strict special- 
ism. A series of acts of advantage to the com- 
munity are slowly developed, and are repeated so 
frequently that they become instinctive, while a 
fixed circle of duties arises, through whose links 
it is almost impossible to break. There is no 
reason to believe that the individual initiative is 
wanting. The varied round of duties of a com- 
munity of ants, for instance, could only have 
arisen through step after step of progress from 
the condition of the solitary ants. If such steps 
have been made, others may be made, and are 
likely to be preserved if found advantageous. 
The ant individual preserves its powers of obser- 
vation and thought and may initiate new processes. 
But most of the ant communities are already so 


THE DEVELOPMENT OF INTELLIGENCE 85 


excellently adapted to the conditions of their life 
as to leave little opportunity for improvement, so 
that the adoption of new and advantageous habits 
are certain to be exceedingly rare. 

It is an interesting fact that communalism has 
been confined to animals of comparatively low 
organization. The most complete examples of it 
exist in the polyps and some other low forms, in 
which each community has become a compound 
individual, the members remaining attached to the 
parent stock. The next higher examples to be 
met are the frequently cited ants and bees, belong- 
ing to the lowly organized class of arthropoda, yet, 
through the advantage of association and mutual 
aid, developing actions and habits only found else- 
where in the human race. The only example 
among vertebrates is that of the beavers, mem- 
bers of the low order of rodents. With these the 
results are less varied and intricate than with the 
ants, in accordance with the much smaller size of 
the community. All the higher vertebrates are 
either social or solitary in habit, and among them 
the narrow specialism of the communal forms does 
not exist. Each individual works in large measure 
for itself, its mental powers remain generalized, 
and it is not tied down to the performance of a 
series of fixed hereditary acts from which escape 
is well-nigh impossible. 

Of the social animals, man presents the most 
complete type, and the one from which we can 


86 MAN AND HIS ANCESTOR 


best deduce the conditions of the class. A human 
community is made up of individuals of many 
degrees of intellectual ability, the mass remaining 
at a low level, the few attaining a high level. Yet 
those of high powers of intellect set the standard 
for the whole, teach the lower either by precept or 
example, and aid effectively in advancing the stand- 
ard of the community. A rope or chain is said to 
be as weak as its weakest part. A human com- 
munity, on the contrary, may be said to be as 
strong as its strongest part. The standing of the 
whole is dependent upon the thoughts and acts of 
the few, from whom the general mass receive new 
ideas and gain new habits. The existing intellec- 
tual and industrial position of mankind is very 
largely a result of ideas evolved by individuals 
age after age, and preserved as the mental prop- 
erty of the whole. Destroy the books and works 
of art and industry of any community, cut off its 
intellectual leaders, remove from the general mind 
the results of education, and it would at once fall 
back to a low level and be obliged to begin again 
its slow climb upward. The intellectual standing 
of any civilized nation depends upon two things: 
the preservation in books, in memory, and in 
works of art and industry, of the ideas of ancient 
workers and thinkers; and the mental activity of 
living thinkers and inventors, whose work takes 
its start from this standpoint of stored-up thought. 
Rob any community of all its basic ideas, and it 


LAE DEVELOPMENT CRINTELLIGENGE 87 


would quickly retrograde to a primitive condition 
of thought and organization, from which it might 
need many centuries to emerge. 

It has been said above that man is the highest 
example of the social animal. While that is the 
truth, it is not the whole truth. He is at the same 
time the highest example of the communal animal. 
Mutual aid, organization into strictly rounded com- 
munities, labor for the good of the whole, is as 
declared in him as in the most developed community 
of the ants, and we admire the work of the latter 
simply because they repeat at a lower level the 
work of man. In truth, in man we havea splendid 
example of the existence of the individual initiative 
in connection with the communal organization. 
Specialism exists ina hundred forms. Some nations 
have been tied down by it to conditions almost 
as fixed as those of the ants. But generalism exists 
in as full a measure, new ideas are constantly 
modifying or replacing the old, and the communism 
of man is a progressive one, steadily borne upward 
on the wings of new ideas. Individual thought 
has the fullest swing, and it is to the system of 
special reward for useful thought and act that man 
owes much of his great advance. On the other 
hand, reward without useful service has been one 
of the leading agencies that have acted to check 
human progress. 

The lower animals do not possess the advantage 
of man in his power of preserving the thoughts and 


88 MAN AND HIS ANCESTOR 


products of the past as a foundation for new steps 
of progress. Memory may aid them to a slight de- 
gree, but they have no special means of recording 
usefulideas. This cannot fairly be said of the com- 
runal forms, which possess the result of the labors 
of former generations as useful object lessons. But 
in the higher animals no means exist for the per- 
manent preservation of ideas, and each step of 
progress must be due to the direct influence of 
living individuals and the indirect result of natural 
selection. 

This is one cause of the slow mental advance of 
the lower animals. A second is the deficiency in 
educational influences, which have had so much to 
do with human progress. Education is not quite 
wanting in the brute creation. There are many 
instances on record of instruction given by the 
adults to the young. But this agency is in its 
embryo stage, and its influence must be small. 
Again, each tribe of lower animals is apt to fall 
into a fixed circle of life acts, to become so closely 
adapted to some situation or condition that any 
change of habits would be likely to prove detri- 
mental. This is a state of affairs tending to pro- 
duce stagnation and vigorously to check advance. 
Many instances of this could be cited from human 
history, while it is the common condition with the 
animals below man. 

To return to the apes, the considerations above 
taken lead to the conclusion that it is chiefly, if not 


THE DEVELOPMENT OF INTELLIGENCE 89 


solely, to their social habits that they owe their 
mental quickness. While only in minor traits com- 
munal, they are eminently social, and have doubt- 
less derived great advantage from this. The 
lemurs, which share their habitat and resemble 
them in organization, are markedly unsocial, and 
are as mentally dull as the apes are mentally 
quick. Possibly, the thought powers of the apes 
once set in train, there may have been something 
in the exigencies of arboreal life that quickened 
their powers of observation ; but we are constrained 
to believe that the main influence to which they 
owe their development is that of social habits, in 
which they stand at a high, if not the highest, 
level among the distinctly social animals. 

The thought capacities of the ape intellect are 
general, not special. The mind of these animals 
remains free and capable of new thought in new 
situations. It is fully alive to the needs and dan- 
gers of arboreal life, and advances no farther in its 
native habitat because there is nothing more of 
importance to be learned. But while fixed it is not 
stagnant. When the ape is taken from its native 
woods and put among the many new conditions 
arising on shipboard and in human habitations, we 
quickly perceive indications of its mental alertness. 
Its faculties of observation and imitation are ac- 
tively exercised, and new habits and conceptions 
are quickly gained. Could the apes be made to 
breed freely in captivity, so that a domestic race, 


90 MAN AND HIS ANCESTOR 


comparable to that of the dogs, could be obtained, 
their mental powers might, perhaps, be cultivated 
to an extraordinary degree, yielding instances of 
thought approaching that of man. The ape is espe- 
cially notable for its tendency to attempt new acts 
of itself, not waiting to be taught, as in the case of 
other domesticated animals. In short, it seems by 
all odds to be the animal best fitted mentally to 
serve as the basis of a high intellectual develop- 
ment, as it is the best fitted physically to change 
from the attitude of the quadruped to that of the 
biped. 

The anthropoid apes in general manifest a rever- 
sion from the social toward the solitary state, this 
condition reaching its ultimate in the orang, which 
is one of the most solitary of animals. The smaller 
forms are the most social, the gibbons being decid- 
edly so. There is very good reason to believe 
that the man-ape was highly social, if we may 
judge from what we find in all races of men, 
and all grades, from the savage to the civilized. 
This animal was thus in a position to avail itself 
of all the advantages of the social habit, and to 
gain the mental development thence arising. 
How long ago it was when it left the trees and 
made its home upon the ground, it is impossible 
to say. It may have been as far back as the 
early Pliocene or the late Miocene Period, or even 
earlier. As yet its brain was probably no more 
developed than in the case of the other anthro- 


THE DEVELOPMENT OF INTELLIGENCE ogi 


poids, perhaps less so than in the existing species. 
But in its new habitat it was exposed to a series of 
novel conditions that must have exerted a health- 
ful and stimulating influence upon its mind. 

If it had remained in the trees we should prob- 
ably to-day have only a man-ape still. Leaving 
their safe shelter for the ground, it became ex- 
posed to new dangers and was forced to fit itself 
to fresh conditions. Prowling carnivorous animals 
haunted its new place of residence, and these it had 
to avoid by speed or alertness of motion, or combat 
them by strength and the use of weapons. The 
carnivorous tastes which it had in all probability 
gained, made it a creature of the chase, pursuing 
swift animals, capturing them by fleetness or 
stratagem, or bringing them down with the aid of 
clubs and missiles. Such a new series of duties 
and dangers could not fail to exert a vigorous 
influence upon a brain already quick of thought 
and susceptible to fresh impressions, and we may 
well conceive that the man-ape then entered upona 
new and rapid phase of mental progress, its brain 
developing in powers and growing in dimensions 
as it slowly became adapted to its new situation 
and grew able to cope with fresh demands and 
critical exigencies. 

There is still another influence which has had 
its share, perhaps a very prominent share, in the 
intellectual development of animals, yet which no 
writer seems to have considered from this point of 


O2 MAN AND HIS ANCESTOR 


view. The probable effect of this influence needs 
to be taken into account, in conclusion of this sec- 
tion of our subject. It is that of the comparative 
agency of the senses in the development of the 
mind, and the effects likely to arise from the domi- 
nance of some one of the senses. 

In the lowest animals touch was the predomi- 
nant, if not the only sense, taste perhaps being 
associated with it. But these senses, which de- 
mand actual contact with objects, obviously could 
give none but the narrowest conception of the con- 
ditions of nature. The other senses, sight, hear- 
ing, and smell, give intimations of the existence 
and conditions of more or less distant objects, and 
their development greatly widened the scope of 
outreach in animals and must have exerted a 
powerful influence upon the growth of mental 
conditions. 

It need scarcely be said that the sense which 
gives the fullest and most extended information 
about existing things is necessarily the one that 
acts most effectively upon the mind, and that this 
sense is that of sight. Hearing and smell yield us 
information concerning certain local conditions of 
objects, but sight extends to the limits of the uni- 
verse, while in regard to near objects it has the ad- 
vantage of being practically instantaneous in action 
and much fuller in the information it conveys. 
Sight, therefore, is evidently the most important of 
the senses, so far as the broadening of the mental 


THE DEVELOPMENT, OF INTELLIGENCE? | O3 


powers is concerned, and any animal in which it is 
predominant must possess a great advantage in this 
respect over those species controlled to any great 
degree by one of the lower senses. 

It may be said here that sight only slowly gained 
dominance in animal life. Though the eye, as an 
organ of vision, is found ata low level in the ani- 
mate scale, the indications are that it long played 
a subordinate part, and has gained its full promi- 
nence only in man. During long ages life was 
confined to the sea, hosts of beings dwelling in the 
semi-obscurity of the under waters, and great num- 
bers at too great a depth for light to reach them. 
To vast multitudes of these sight was partly or 
completely useless. The same may be said of 
hearing, the under-water habitat being nearly or 
completely a soundless one. The only one of the 
higher senses likely to be of general use to these 
oceanic forms is that of smell, and it may be 
that their knowledge of distant objects was mainly 
gained through sensitiveness to odors. 

Of invertebrate land animals the same must be 
said. The land mollusks and the great order of 
insects and other land arthropods only to a minor 
extent dwell in the open light. Very many species 
haunt the semi-obscurity of trees or groves, hide 
among the grasses, lurk under bark, sticks, and 
stones, or dwell through most of their lives under- 
ground. Hosts of others are nocturnal. To only 
a small percentage of insects can sight be of any | 


94 MAN AND HIS ANCESTOR 


great utility, while hearing seems also to be of 
slight importance. Smell is probably the principal 
sense through which these animals gain informa- 
tion of distant objects. 

There is existing evidence that the sense of 
smell in some insects is remarkably acute. The 
imprisoned female of certain nocturnal species, 
for instance, will attract the males from a com- 
paratively immense distance, under conditions in 
which neither sight nor hearing could have been 
brought into play. The emission of odors and 
acute sensibility to them is the only presumable 
agency at work in those instances. As regards the 
most intelligent of the insects, the ants and the ter- 
mites, the former are largely subterranean, the 
latter not only subterranean, but blind. In the 
one case, sight can play only a minor part, in 
the other, it plays no part at all. Touch and 
smell seem to be the dominant senses in these 
animals, and the degree of intelligence they dis- 
play shows of how high a development these senses 
are susceptible. Yet the intelligence arising from 
them must necessarily be local and limited in its 
application ; it cannot yield the breadth of infor- 
mation and degree of mental development possible 
under the dominance of sight. 

In the vertebrates we find a fully developed and 
broadly capable organ of vision, and it might be 
hastily assumed that in those animals sight is the 
dominant sense. But there are numerous facts 


THE DEVELOPMENT OF INTELLIGENCE 95 


which lead to a different conclusion. Many of the 
vertebrates are nocturnal, many dwell in obscure 
situations, many in the total darkness of caverns, 
underground tunnels and excavations, or the ocean’s 
depths. To all these sight must be of secondary 
importance. Hearing also can be of no superior 
value, and the dominant sense must be that of smell. 
In the bats there would appear to be a remarkably 
acute power of touch, if we may judge from the 
facility with which they can avoid obstacles at full 
flight after their eyes have been removed. 

It might, however, be supposed that in the 
higher land vertebrates sight is predominant, and 
that the diurnal mammals depend principally upon 
their eyes for their knowledge of nature. But 
there are facts which throw doubt upon this sup- 
position. These facts are of two kinds, external 
and internal. That the quadrupeds, in general, 
are highly sensitive to odors is well known, and 
also that they trust very largely to the sense of 
smell. Hunters are abundantly aware of this, and 
have to be quite as careful to avoid being smelt by 
their game as to avoid being seen. We have abun- 
dant evidence of the remarkable acuteness of this 
sense in so high an animal as the dog, which can 
follow its prey for miles by scent alone, and can 
distinguish the odors, not only of different species, 
but of different individuals, being capable of fol- 
lowing the trail of one person amid the tracks of 
numerous others. 


96 MAN AND HIS ANCESTOR 


The internal evidence of this fact is equally sig- 
nificant. In the vertebrates, in general, the olfac- 
tory lobe of the brain is largely developed, much 
exceeding in size the lobe of the optic nerve. It 
forms the anterior portion of the cerebrum, and in 
many instances constitutes a large section of that 
organ, being marked off from it by only a slight 
surface depression. If we can fairly judge, then, 
by anatomical evidence, the sense of smell plays a 
very prominent part in the life of all the lower 
vertebrates. If we take our domestic animals as 
an example, the olfactory lobe of the horse is con- 
siderably larger than that of man, though the brain, 
as a whole, is very much smaller, so that, compara- 
tively, this organ constitutes a much larger portion 
of the total brain. The other domestic animals 
yield similar evidence of the great activity of the 
sense of smell. 

While there is no doubt that sight is an active 
sense in all the higher quadrupeds, it evidently 
divides this activity with smell to a much greater 
degree than is the case with man, in whom smell 
plays a minor part, sight a major part, among the 
organs of sense. 

This fact shows its effect in the comparative 
mental development of man and the lower ani- 
mals. Man, depending so largely on vision, gains 
the broadest conception of the conditions of nature, 
with a consequent great expansion of the intel- 
lect. The quadrupeds, depending to a considerable 


THEM DEVELOPMENT NOL INTELLIGENGE. | OF 


degree upon smell for their conceptions of nature, 
are much narrower in their range of information 
and lower in their mental development. As re- 
gards the ape family, it occupies a position be- 
tween man and the quadrupeds, and its intellectual 
activity may well be due in great measure to an 
increased trust in sight and a decreased trust in 
smell in gaining its conception of nature. 

The question may arise, Why, if sight has this 
superiority over smell, did it not long since gain 
predominance, and relegate smell to a minor posi- 
tion? It may be answered that the superiority of 
sight is not complete. In one particular this sense 
is inferior to smell. The leading agency in the 
development of the sense organs of animals has 
been the struggle for existence, including escape 
from enemies, and the perception of food-animals 
or material. In these processes acuteness of smell 
plays a very important part. It has, moreover, the 
advantage of gathering information from all direc- 
tions, while sight is very limited in its range. The 
eye is so subject to injury that its multiplication 
‘over the body would be rather disadvantageous 
than otherwise, while, localized as it is, a movement 
of the head is necessary to any breadth of vision, 
and the whole body must rotate to bring the com- 
plete horizon under observation. It seems evident, 
from these considerations, that sight is much in- 
ferior to smell in the timely perception of many 


forms of danger. Light comes in straight lines 
H 


98 MAN AND HIS ANCESTOR 


only, and a movement of the body is necessary to 
perceive perils lying outside these lines. Odors, 
on the contrary, spread in all directions, and make 
themselves manifest from the rear as well as the 
front. 

In all probability this fact has had much to do 
with the continued dependence of animals on smell. 
In fishes and reptiles a full sweep of vision is so 
slowly gained that some more active sentinel sense 
is requisite to safety. In mammals the head ro- 
tates more easily, but valuable time is lost in the 
rotation of the whole body. These animals, there- 
fore, depend on both sight and smell, in some 
cases equally, in some more fully on one or the 
other of these senses. When we reach the semi- 
upright ape, we have to do with a form capable 
of turning the body and observing the whole 
surrounding circle of objects more quickly and 
readily than any quadruped. As a result, these 
animals have grown to depend more fully on 
vision and less on smell than the quadrupeds. 
Finally, in fully erect man, the power of quick 
turning and alert observation of the whole cir- 
cle Gofjthe, horizon’ reaches (its ‘ultimatesandmen 
man sight has become in a large degree the 
dominant sense, and smell has fallen to a minor 
place. 

With this change in the relations of the senses 
has come a change in the degree of mental develop- 
ment. It is highly probable that the dependence 


THE DEVELOPMENT OF INTELLIGENCE 99 


of the apes on vision instead of smell has had 
much to do with their mental activity, quickness 
of observation, and active curiosity. In man there 
can be no question that it has played a great part 
in the rapid development of his intellectual powers, 
and in the extraordinary breadth of his conception 
of nature as compared with that of the lower 
animals. While hearing and smell advise us of 
neighboring conditions only, and have their chief 
utility as aids to the preservation of existence, sight 
makes us aware of the conditions of nature in re- 
mote localities, extending far beyond the limits of 
the earth. While this sense plays its part as one 
of the protective agencies, it is still more useful as 
an agent in the acquisition of knowledge in general, 
and has much to do with the development of the 
intellectual faculties. We may look, therefore, upon 
the increasing dominance of the sense of sight as 
a leading agency in the making of man as a think- 
ing being, and may ascribe to this in a considerable 
measure the thirst for information and faculty of 
imitation so marked in the apes. 


VII 


THE ORIGIN OF LANGUAGE 


OnE of the characteristics of man, of which we 
spoke as among those to which his high develop- 
ment is due, is that of language. There is nothing 
that has had more to do with the mental progress 
of the human race than facility in the communica- 
tion of thought, and in this vocal language is the 
principal agent and in the fullest measure is the 
instrument of the mind. Human speech has, in 
these modern times, become remarkably expres- 
sive, indicating all the conditions, relations, and 
qualities, not only of things, but of thoughts and 
ideal conceptions. And the utility of language 
has been enormously augmented by the develop- 
ment of the arts of writing and printing. Origin- 
ally thought could only be communicated by word 
of mouth and transmitted by the aid of the memory. 
Now it can be recorded and kept indefinitely, so 
that no useful thought of able thinkers need be 
lost, but every valuable idea can be retained as an 
educative influence through unnumbered ages. 

In this instrumentality, which has been of such 
extraordinary value to man, the lower animals are 


strikingly deficient. They are not quite devoid of 
100 


THE ORIGIN OF LANGUAGE Ior 


vocal language, though it is doubtful if any of the 
sounds made by them have a much higher lin- 
guistic office than that of the interjection. But 
emotional sounds, to which these belong, are not 
destitute of value in conveying intelligence. They 
embrace cries of warning, appeals to affection, 
demands for help, calls for food supplies, threats, 
and other indications of passion, fear, or feeling. 
And the significance of these vocal sounds to ani- 
mals may often be higher than we suppose. That 
is, they may not be limited to the vague character 
of the interjection, but may occasionally convey a 
specific meaning, indicative of some object or some 
action. In other words, they may advance from 
the interjection toward the noun or the verb, and 
approach in value the verbal root, a sound which 
embraces a complete proposition. Thus a cry of 
warning may be so modulated as to indicate to the 
hearer, ‘‘ Beware, a lion is coming!” or to convey 
some other specific warning. We know that accent 
or tone plays a great part in Chinese speech, the 
most primitive of existing forms, a variation in tone 
quite changing the meaning of words. The same 
may be the case with the sounds uttered by animals 
to a much greater extent than we suppose. 

We know this to be the case with some of the 
birds. The common fowl of our poultry yards has 
a variety of distinct calls, each understood by its 
mates, while special modulations of some call or 
cry are not uncommon among birds. The mam- 


102 MAN AND HIS ANCESTOR 


malia are not fluent in vocal powers, their range 
of tones being limited, yet they certainly con- 
vey definite information to one another. Recent 
observers have come to the conclusion that the 
apes do, to a certain extent, talk with one another. 
The experiments to prove this have not been 
very satisfactory, yet they seem to indicate that 
the woodland cries of the apes possess a certain 
range of definite meaning. 

We are utterly ignorant of what powers of 
speech the man-ape possessed. It must, in its 
developed state as a land-dwelling, wandering, 
and hunting biped, have needed a wider range 
of utterance than during its arboreal residence. 
It was exposed to new dangers, new exigencies 
of life affected it, and its old cries very probably 
gained new meanings, or new cries were developed 
to meet new perils or conditions. In this way a 
few root words may have been gained, rising above 
the value of the interjection, and expressing some 
degree of definite meaning, though still at the bot- 
tom of the scale of language, the first stepping 
stones from the vague cry toward the significant 
word. 

Between this stage and that of human language 
an immense gap supervenes, a broad abyss which it 
seems at first sight impossible to bridge. As the 
facts stand, however, it has been largely bridged 
by man himself. Side by side with the highly 
intricate languages which now exist, are various 


THE ORIGIN OF LANGUAGE 103 


primitive forms of speech which take us far back 
toward the origin of human language. So ad- 
vanced a people as the Chinese speak a language 
practically composed of root words, the higher 
forms of expression being attained by simple de- 
vices in the combination of these primitive word 
forms. The same may be said, in a measure, of 
ancient Egyptian speech. We can conceive of an 
early state of affairs in which these devices of 
word compounding were not yet employed, and 
in which each word existed as a separate expres- 
sion, unmodified by association with any other 
word. Among the savage races of the earth very 
crude forms of language often exist, the methods 
of associating words into sentences being of the 
simplest character, though few surpass the Chinese 
in simplicity of system. 

But all this represents an advanced stage of 
language evolution, a development of thought and 
its instrument which has taken thousands of years 
to complete. We cannot fairly judge from it what 
the speech of primitive man may have been, for in 
every case there has been a long process of devel- 
opment; aided, no doubt, in many cases, by educa- 
cative influences acting from the more advanced 
upon the speech of the less advanced races. 

If we seek to analyze any of these languages, 
the most intricate as well as the least advanced, 
we find ourselves in most instances able to isolate 
the root word as the basic element of speech. 


104. MAN AND HIS ANCESTOR 


From this simple form all the more developed 
forms seem to have arisen. Take away their com- 
bining devices, and the root words fall apart like 
so many beads of speech, each with a defined sig- 
nificance of its own and fully capable of existing 
by itself. The Aryan and the Chinese especially 
offer themselves to this analytic method. Strip 
off the suffixes and affixes from Aryan words, get 
down to the germinal forms from which these 
words have grown, isolate these germs of speech, 
and we find ourselves in a language of root forms, 
each of which has grown vague and wide in 
significance as the modifying elements that lim- 
ited its ‘meaning, have been’ removed: [nthe 
Chinese the problem is a much simpler one. We 
need simply to take the existing words out of 
their place in the sentence and let them stand 
alone, and we have root words at first hand. We 
may go through the whole range of human speech 
and, with more or less difficulty, arrive at a similar 
result. In short, the evidence seems conclusive 
that the language of mankind began in the use 
of isolated words of vague and broad signifi- 
cance, and that all the subsequent development 
of language consisted in the combination of these 
words, with a modification and limitation of their 
meaning, the families of speech differing princi- 
pally in the method of combination devised. 

It must, indeed, be said that in isolating the root 
forms of modern languages we reach conditions still 


THE ORIGIN OF LANGUAGE 105 


far removed from those of primitive speech. These 
roots are in a measure packed with meaning. Time 
has added to their significance, and they lack the 
simplicity they probably once possessed. In par- 
ticular, they have gained ideal senses, entered in 
a measure into that broad language of the mind 
which has been gradually added to the language of 
outer nature. The recognition of the existence of 
mind and thought doubtless came somewhat late 
in human development. Man long knew only his 
body and the world that surrounded it. Step by 
step only did he discover his mind. And when it 
became necessary to speak of mental conditions, 
no new language was invented, but old words were 
broadened to cover the new conditions. The mind 
is analogous to the body in its operations, ideas 
are analogues of things, and it was usually neces- 
sary only to add to the physical significance of 
words the corresponding ideal significance. In 
this way a secondary language slowly grew up, 
underlying and subtending the primary language, 
until the words invented to express the world of 
things were employed to include as vast a world 
of thoughts. 

In getting down, then, to the language of primi- 
tive man we are obliged to divest the root forms 
of speech of all this ideal significance, and confine 
them to their physical meanings. In dealing with 
the languages of the least advanced existing tribes 
of mankind, indeed, little of this is requisite. The 


106 MAN AND HIS ANCESTOR 


language of the mind with them has not yet begun 
its growth or is in its first simple stages. Only 
half the work of the evolution of language is com- 
pleted. There is, indeed, no tribe so undeveloped 
as to use the primitive forms of speech. The most 
savage of the races of mankind have made some 
progress in the art of combining words, gained 
some ideas of syntax and grammatical forms. Yet 
in certain instances the progress has been very 
slight, and in all we can see the living traces of the 
earlier method of speech from which they emerged. 

It is to the ability to think abstractly and to form 
words with an abstract significance that human 
language owes much of its high development. 
But this ability is largely confined to civilized 
mankind, savages being greatly or wholly lacking 
in it. This deficiency is indicated in their modes 
of speech. Thus a native of the Society Islands, 
while able to say ‘‘dog’s tail,” “sheep’s tail,” etc., 
has no separate word for tail. He cannot abstract 
the general term from its immediate relations. In 
the same way the uncivilized Malay has twenty 
different words to express striking with various 
objects, as with thick or thin wood, a club, the fist, 
the palm, etc., but he has no word for ‘striking ”’ 
as an isolated thought. We find the same defi- 
ciency in the speech of the American Indians. A 
Cherokee, for instance, has no word for “‘ washing,” 
but can express the different kinds of washing by 
no less than thirteen distinct words. 


THE ORIGIN OF LANGUAGE 107 


All this indicates a primitive stage in the evolu- 
tion of language, one in which every word had its 
immediate and local application, while in each word 
a whole story was told. The power of dividing 
thought into its separate elements was not yet pos- 
sessed. As thought progressed men got from the 
idea of “‘dog”’ to that of ‘dog’s tail.” They could 
not think of the part without the whole. Then 
they reached a word for “ dog’s tail wags.” But the 
idea of “ wags” as an abstract motion was beyond 
their powers of thought. They could not think of 
action, but only of some object in action. The 
language of the American Indians was an immedi- 
ate derivation from this mode of word formation, 
every proposition, however intricate it might be, 
constituting a single word, whose component parts 
could not be used separately. The mode of speech 
here indicated is one form of development of the 
root. Other forms are the compounding of the Chi- 
nese and the Mongolian and the inflection of the 
Aryan and the Semitic, all pointing directly back 
to the root form as their unit of growth. 

The inference to be drawn from all this is that 
the language of primitive man consisted of isolated 
words, sounds which may originally have been mere 
cries or calls, but which gradually gained some 
definiteness of meaning, as signifying some of the 
varied conditions of the outer world. This is the 
conclusion to which philologists have now very 
generally come. The recognition that language 


108 MAN AND HIS ANCESTOR 


consists of root words, variously modified and com- 
bined, leads back irresistibly to a period in which 
those roots had not yet begun to be modified and 
combined. | The roots are) the hard, persistent 
things in human speech. Grammatical expedients 
are the net in which these roots have been caught 
and confined. Free them from the net, and it falls 
to pieces, while the roots remain intact, the solid 
and persistent primitive germs of speech. 

Yet in isolating root language as the basis of 
grammatical language we go far toward closing 
the gap between animal and human speech. It 
is still, doubtless, of considerable width, yet the 
distinction is no longer one of kind, but is simply 
one of degree. Primitive man had a much greater 
scope of language than is possessed by any of the 
lower animals, and the vocal sounds used had a 
clearer and more definite significance; but their 
nature was the same. They doubtless began in calls 
and cries like those in use by animals, and though 
these had increased in number and gained more 
distinct meanings, the difference in character was 
not great. In short, the analytic method employed 
by modern philologists has gone far to remove the 
supposed vast distinction between brute and human 
speech, and has traced back the language of man 
to a stage in which it is nearly related in character 
to the language of animals. The distinction has 
been brought down to one of degree, scarcely one 
of kind. A direct and simple process of evolution 


THE ORIGIN OF LANGUAGE 109 


Pes 


was alone needed to produce it, and through that 
evolution man undoubtedly passed in his progress 
upward from his ancestral stage. 

The language of the lower animals is a vowel 
form of speech. It lacks the consonantal elements, 
the characteristic of articulation. In this man seems 
to have at first agreed with them. The infant 
begins its vocal utterances with simple cries; only 
at a later age does it begin to articulate. If we 
may judge from the development of language in 
the child, man began to speak with the use of 
sounds native to the vocal organs, and progressed 
by a process of imitation, endeavoring to reproduce 
the sounds heard around him: the voices of ani- 
mals, the sounds of nature, etc. This tendency to 
imitate is not peculiar to man. It exists in many 
birds, and in some attains a marked development. 
The mocking bird, for instance, has an extraor- 
dinary flexibility of the vocal organs and power of 
imitating the voices of other birds. The parrot 
and some other birds go farther in this direction, 
being capable of using articulate language and 
clearly repeating words used by man. 

None of the mammalia possess this facility. It 
is not found in the apes, and probably was not 
possessed by the ancestor of man. But it is not 
difficult to believe that in the efforts of the lat- 
ter to gain a greater variety of vocal utterance, its 
organs of speech became more flexible, and in 
time it gained the power of articulation. 


IIo MAN AND HIS ANCESTOR 


There are races of existing men whose powers 
of language seem still in the transition stage 
between articulate and inarticulate speech. This 
seems the case with the Bushmen and Hottentots 
of South Africa, whose vocal utterances consist 
largely of a series of peculiar clicks that are cer- 
tainly not articulate speech, though on the road 
toward it. The Pygmies of the Central African 
forests seem similarly to occupy an intermediate 
position in the development of language. Those 
who have endeavored to talk with them speak of 
their utterance as being inarticulate in sound. It | 
appears to be a sort of link between articulate and 
inarticulate speech. In short, the great abyss 
which was of old thought to lie between the lan- 
guages of man and the lower animals has largely 
vanished through the labors of philologists, and 
we can trace stepping-stones over every portion 
of the wide gap. The language of man has not 
alone been evidently a product of evolution, but 
also one of development from the vocal utterances 
of the lower animals; and the man-ape, in its slow 
and long progress from brute into man, seems to 
have gradually developed that noble instrument 
of articulate speech which has had so much to do 
with subsequent human progress. 


VITl 


HOW THE CHASM WAS BRIDGED 


In his bodily formation the man-ape differed 
little from man. The differences which existed 
were probably of a minor character, no greater 
than could readily exist within the limits of a 
species. If this assertion be questioned, it seems 
sufficient to call attention to the recent researches 
into the anatomy of the anthropoid apes, which 
differ in species, if not in genera, from man, yet 
are closely similar to him in all their main fea- 
tures of organization. Even in the brain, to whose 
great development man owes his superiority, the 
only marked difference is in size. Structurally, 
the distinctions are unimportant. If, then, these 
distant relatives so closely resemble man in phys- 
ical frame, his immediate relative in the line of 
descent must have approached him still more 
closely in organization. After this ancestor had 
become a true, surface-dwelling biped, the differ- 
ences in structure were probably so slight that 
physically the two forms were in effect identical. 
The man-ape was, as there is reason to believe, 
considerably smaller than man, perhaps about 


equal in size and stature to the chimpanzee, but 
Iit 


hig MAN AND HIS ANCESTOR 


that dogs not constitute a specific difference. 
There may have been some differences in the 
skeletal and muscular structure. The vocal or- 
gans, for instance, probably differed, the evolution 
of language in man being accompanied with cer- 
tain changes in the larynx. The skull was cer- 
tainly much more ape-like. Yet variations of this 
kind, due to differences in mode of life, are minor 
in importance, and may easily come within the 
limits of a species. While the great features of 
organization remain intact, small changes, due to 
new exigencies of life, may take place without 
affecting the zodlogical position of an animal. 
The most striking difference between man-ape 
and man, that of the development of the brain 
to two or three times its size and weight, is simi- 
larly unessential in classification while the brain 
remains unchanged in structure. That it has 
remained unchanged we may safely deduce from 
the close similarity between the brain of man and 
those of the existing anthropoid apes. The cause 
of the increase in size is so evident that it need 
only be referred to. Since the era of the man-ape, 
almost the whole sum of the forces of development 
have been centred in the mental powers of this 
animal, with the result that the brain has grown in 
size and functional capacity, while the remainder 
of the body has remained practically unchanged. 
That man as an animal has descended from the 
lower life realm, none who are familiar with the 


7 


HOW THE CHASM WAS BRIDGED 113 


facts of science now think of denying. This has 
attained to the scientist, and to many non-scientists, 
the level of a self-evident proposition. But that 
man as a thinking being has descended from the 
lower animals is a different matter, concerning 
which opinion is by no means in unison. Even 
among scientists some degree of difference of 
opinion exists, and such a radical evolutionist as 
Alfred Russell Wallace finds here a yawning gap 
in the line of descent, and is inclined to look upon 
the intellect of man as a direct gift from the 
realm of spirits. His explanation, it is true, is 
more difficult than the problem itself. There are 
no facts to sustain it, and even if he were not able 
to see how man’s mind could be developed by natu- 
ral selection, it is a sort of reductio ad absurdum to 
call in the angels to bridge the chasm. 

Romanes has dealt with the subject from a dif- 
ferent and more scientific point of view, and seems 
to have succeeded in showing that man’s intellect 
at its lowest level is not different in kind from the 
brute intellect at its highest level. Controversy 
on this subject is too apt to be based on the differ- 
ence between the intellect of the brute and that of 
enlightened man, in disregard of the great mental 
gap which exists between the latter and the thought 
powers of the lowest savage. In the preceding 
section an effort was made to show how crude and 
imperfect must have been the language of primi- 


tive man. Its imperfection was a fair gauge of 
I 


It4 MAN AND HIS ANCESTOR 


that of his powers of thought. His intellect stood 
at a very low level, seemingly no further above 
that of the highest apes than it was below that of 
enlightened man. 

In fact, enormous as is the interval between 
the mind of the brute and that of the man of 
modern civilization, the whole long line of mental 
development can be traced, with the exception of a 
comparatively small interval. This is the gap be- 
tween the intellect of the anthropoid ape and that 
of primitive man, the one important last chapter 
in the story of mental evolution. Supernaturalism, 
driven from its strongholds of the past, has taken 
its last stand upon this broken link, claiming that 
here the line of descent fails, and that the gap 
could not have been filled without a direct inflow 
of intellect from the world of spirits or an imme- 
diate act of creation from the Deity. 

This view of the case is not likely to be accepted 
as final. Science has bridged so many gaps in 
the kingdom of nature that it is not likely to retire 
baffled from this one, but will continue its investi- 
gations in place of accepting conclusions that have 
not the standing even of hypothesis, since they 
are unsupported by a single known fact. At first 
sight, indeed, the facts which bear upon this ques- 
tion seem stubborn things to explain by the evo- 
lution theory. The gap in intellect between the 
highest apes and the lowest man is a considera- 
ble one, which no existing ape seems likely ever to 


HOW THE CHASM WAS BRIDGED I15 


cross. However the anthropoid apes gained their 
degree of mental ability, it does not appear to be 
on the increase. They are in a. state of mental 
stagnation and may have remained so for millions 
of years. Something similar, indeed, can be said 
of the lowest savages. They also are mentally 
stagnant. The indications are that for thousands, 
or tens of thousands, of years in the past their 
intellectual progress has been almostnothing. Yet 
it is beyond reasonable question that the advanced 
thinker of to-day has evolved from an ancestor as 
low in the mental scale as this savage, probably 
much lower; and this renders it very conceivable 
that a similar process of evolution covered the 
interval between the ape intellect and that of 
primitive man. 

Somewhere, at some time in the far past, the 
mental stagnation of man was broken, and the de- 
velopment of the mind began its long progression 
toward enlightenment. This was not in the local- 
ities in which the lower savages are now found, the 
equatorial forests of Africa and South America 
and other realms of savage life, the change in all 
probability taking place elsewhere, under new and 
severe exigencies of life. Similarly we have much 
justification in saying that somewhere, at some 
time, the mental stagnation of the ape was broken, 
and the long development of the mind from ape 
to man began. This did not take place in the 
instances of the existing anthropoids, and, as in the 


116 MAN AND HIS ANCESTOR 


analogous case of civilized man, its influencing 
cause must be looked for in exigencies of existence 
acting upon some form different in character and 
habitat from these apes. 

The existing anthropoid apes may justly be com- 
pared in condition with the existing low savages. 
In both cases a satisfactory adaptation to their 
situation has been gained. These apes are still 
arboreal and frugivorous, as their remote ancestors 
were. They have for ages been in a state of close 
adaptation to their life conditions, and the influ- 
ences of development have been largely wanting. 
Such evolution as took place must have been ex- 
tremely slow. In like manner the lowest savages 
live in intimate relations with the conditions sur- 
rounding them. All problems of food-getting, habi- 
tation, climate, etc., have long since been solved, 
and in the tropical forests in which so many of 
them dwell they are in thorough accord with the 
situation. Mentally, therefore, they are practically 
at a standstill and have remained so for thousands 
of years. The two cases are parallel ones. We 
can safely say that the later development of man 
took place in other situations and under other con- 
ditions. We may fairly say the same in regard 
to the ape. Vigorous influences must have been 
brought to bear upon the ancestor of man as the 
instigating causes of its mental development into 
man; and similarly vigorous influences must have 
been brought to bear upon primitive man to set in 


HOW THE CHASM WAS BRIDGED 11g hee 


train his mental development into intellectual man. 
And the general character of these influences in 
both cases may readily be pointed out. An ex- 
traordinary development has taken place in the 
human intellect within a few thousands, or tens of 
thousands, of years, yielding the difference which 
exists between the cultivated man of to-day and 
the debased savage who probably preceded him, 
and whose counterpart still exists. This has un- 
doubtedly been due to influences of the highest 
potency. If we can show that influences of equal 
potency acted upon man’s ancestor, we shall have 
done much toward indicating how the ape brain 
may have grown into the brain of man. 

In both cases the main agency was in all proba- 
bility that of conflict. Both ape and man, as we 
take it, developed through some form of warfare. 
In the former case it was warfare with the ani- 
mal kingdom ; in the latter it was warfare with the 
conditions of nature and with hostile man. Each 
of these has been potent in its effects, and to each 
we owe the completion of a great stage in the evo- 
lution of man. 

In the tropics, the home of the anthropoid apes 
of to-day and, probably, of the animal we have 
named the man-ape, war between man and nature 
scarcely exists. Nature is not hostile to man. 
There is no occasion for clothing and little for 
habitation. Food is abundant for the sparse popu- 
lations. Little exertion is called for to sustain 


118 MAN AND HIS ANCESTOR 


life. Mental stagnation is very likely to supervene. 
Yet there, as elsewhere, conflict has had much to 
do with such mental progress as exists. Mastery 
in warfare is due to superior mental resources, 
which gradually arise from the exigencies of con- 
flict, and manifest themselves in greater shrewd- 
ness or cunning, superior ability in leadership, 
better organization, fuller mutual aid, and the 
invention of more destructive weapons and more 
efficient tools. War acts vigorously on men’s 
minds, peace acts sluggishly. In the former case 
man’s most valued possession, his life, is in jeop- 
ardy, and his utmost powers are exerted for its 
preservation. Every resource within his power is 
brought to bear to save himself from wounds or 
death and to destroy his enemies. If the foes are 
equal physically, victory is apt to come to those 
which are superior mentally, which are quicker at 
devising new expedients, more alert in providing 
against danger, more skilful in the use of weapons, 
abler in combining their forces to act in unison. 
In short, the whole story of mankind tells us that 
mental evolution has been greatly aided by the 
influences of warfare, the reaction upon the mind 
of the effort at self-preservation, the destruction of 
those at a lower level of intellectual alertness, the 
preservation of the abler and more energetic, the 
effect of conflict in bringing into activity all the re- 
sources of the intellect, and the hereditary trans- 
mission of the powers of mind thus developed. It 


HOW THE CHASM WAS BRIDGED II9 


is, undoubtedly, to war between man and man, 
and the conflict with the adverse conditions of 
nature in the colder regions of the earth, that 
man’s development from his lowest to his highest 
intellectual state has been largely due. This is 
by no means to say that war is still necessary for 
this result. Other influences are now at work, 
of equal or superior potency, and while the con- 
flict with nature and the conditions of society is 
still of importance, war between man and man is 
no longer necessary as a mental stimulant. The 
time was, and that not very far in the past, when 
it was an essential element in human development. 

If we descend to the lowest existing savages, 
however, it is to find this agency almost non-exist- 
ent. Wecan perceive in them no organized war- 
fare and no alert conflict with nature. They are 
as yet at the very beginning of this stage of evo- 
lution, and it certainly exerts little influence upon 
them.’ Nature 1s not adverse, life needs’, little 
thought or exertion, they accept the world as they 
find it, without question or revolt, and _ their 
thoughts and habits are as unchangeable as the 
laws of the Medes and Persians. But the fact 
that active warfare does not now exist among the 
lowest tribes of mankind, does not argue that such 
a state has never existed. In truth, we maintain 
that primitive man is the outcome of an active and 
long-continued warfare, and that his settled and 
sluggish condition to-day is the ease that follows 


I20 MAN AND HIS ANCESTOR 


victory. He has conquered and is at rest after his 
labors. 

For if we compare primitive man with the an- 
thropoid apes, it is to find one striking and impor- 
tant difference between them. The anthropoids are 
at a level in position with their animal neighbors. 
Man is lord and master of the animal kingdom, 
the dominant being in the world of life. He has 
no rival in this lordship, but stands alone in his 
relation to the animal kingdom. He is feared and 
avoided by the largest and strongest beasts of field 
and forest. He does not fight defensively, but 
offensively, and whatever his relation to his fel- 
low-man, he admits no equal in the world of life 
below him. He is the only animal that has madea 
struggle for lordship. The gorilla is said to attack 
the lion and drive it from its haunts. If it does 
so, it is not with any desire for mastery, but simply 
to rid itself of a dangerous neighbor. The battle 
for dominion has been confined to man, and in the 
winning of it no small degree of mental develop- 
ment must have taken place. 

The supremacy of man was not gained without 
a struggle, and that a severe and protracted one. 
The animal kingdom did not yield readily to man’s 
lordship, and the war must have been long and bitter, 
settled as the relations now seem. Rest has suc- 
ceeded victory. The lower animals are now sub- 
missive to man, or retire before him in dread of his 
strength and resources, and the strain upon his 


HOW THE CHASM WAS BRIDGED I2I 


powers has ceased. So far as this phase of evolu- 
tion is concerned the influences aiding the mental 
development of man have lost their strength. The 
warfare is over, and man reigns supreme over the 
kingdom of life. 

Of all animals the man-ape was the best adapted 
for such a struggle. The other anthropoid apes, 
while favored by the formation of their hands, 
lacked that freedom of the arms to which man 
mainly owes his success. No other animal has 
ever appeared with arms freed from duty in loco- 
motion and at the same time endued with the 
power of grasping, and these are the features of 
organization to which the evolution of the human 
intellect was wholly due in its first stages. The 
man-ape was not able to contend successfully with 
the larger animals by aid of its natural weapons. 
Its diminutive size, its lack of tearing claws, and 
its lesser powers of speed, left it at a disadvantage, 
and had it attempted to conquer by the aid of its 
strength and the seizing and rending powers of 
teeth and nails, its victory over the larger animals 
would never have been won. Even with the aid of 
the cunning and alertness of the apes, their power 
of observation, their combination for defence and 
attack, and their general mental superiority to the 
tenants of the animal world, their supremacy in 
the event of their becoming carnivorous must 
have been confined to the smaller creatures, and 
could not have been established over the larger 


[22 MAN AND HIS ANCESTOR 


animals of their native habitat except through the 
aid of other than their natural powers. 

It was by the use of artificial weapons that the 
conquest was gained. The tendency to use mis- 
siles as weapons of offence and defence, which is 
shown by various species of monkeys, was in all 
probability greatly developed by the man-ape, the 
only carnivorous member, if our premises are cor- 
rect, of the whole extensive family of the apes, 
and the only one with the free use of its hands 
and arms. By the use of weapons of this kind the 
powers of offence of this animal were enormously 
increased. As skill was acquired in their use, and 
more efficient weapons were selected or formed, 
the man-ape steadily advanced in controlling influ- 
ence, and the lower animal world became more and 
more subordinated. No doubt the struggle was a 
protracted one. The previously dominant animals 
did not submit without a severe and long-continued 
contest. ‘Thousands of years may have passed 
before the larger animals were subdued, for it is 
probable that the invention of superior weapons 
by an animal of low mental powers was a very 
slow process. Each stage of invention gave higher 
success, but these stages were very deliberate ones. 

However this be, we can be assured that the 
superiority of the ancestral man lay in his mental 
resources, and that his victory was due to the 
employment of his mind rather than of his body. 
As aresult, the developing influence of the conflict 


HOW THE CHASM WAS BRIDGED PZ.3 


was exerted upon his brain, the organ of the mind, 
far more than upon his physical frame, and this 
organ gradually increased in size, while the body 
as a whole remained practically unchanged. The 
conflict began with the man-ape on a level in 
power and dominance with animals of its own size 
and inferior to those of greater size and strength. 
It ended with man dominant over all the lower 
animals. Such a progress, if made by any animal 
through variation in physical structure, must have 
caused radical and extraordinary changes in size, 
strength, and utility of the natural organs of of- 
fence. If made, as in the instance in question, 
through development of the organ of the mind 
alone, it could not but have produced a great in- 
crease in the size and power of this organ; and the 
dimensions of the brain in primitive man, as com- 
pared with those of the brain in the anthropoid 
apes, do not seem too great for the magnitude 
of the result. 

The conflict ended, a new animal, man, finally 
and fully emerged from the family of the apes and 
settled down in the restful consciousness of vic- 
tory, with a much larger brain and greatly superior 
mental powers than were possessed at the begin- 
ning of the struggle, yet in physical aspect not 
greatly changed from his ancestral form after it 
had first fully gained the erect attitude. The 
powers gained enabled early man easily to hold 
the position he had won, and there was no further 


124 MAN AND HIS ANCESTOR 


special strain upon his faculties until a new con- 
test began, that between man and nature, supple- 
mented by a still more vital struggle, that between 
man and man. 

To return to the point from which we set out, 
it may be said that, as the man-ape gained facility 
in walking in the erect attitude, and its hands 
and arms became fully adapted to the use of 
weapons, its standing in the animal kingdom 
changed essentially from that before held. Fear 
and flight ended, retreat ceased, attack began, 
pursuit succeeded flight, and the great battle for 
mastery entered upon its long course. An element 
which aided materially in the victory was the social 
habit of the animal in question, and the mutual aid 
which the members of any group gave one an- 
other. Educative influences also naturally follow 
association, every invention or improvement de- 
vised by one becomes the property of the whole, 
and nothing of importance once gained is lost. 

The stages of this progress were, undoubtedly, 
in their outer aspect, stages of improvement in 
weapons. We seem to see ancestral man, in his 
early career as a carnivorous animal, seizing the 
stones and sticks that came readily to hand, and 
flinging them with some little skill at his prey, in 
the same manner as we can perceive the baboon 
doing the same thing. In like manner we observe 
him breaking off branches from the trees and using 
them as clubs. One of the first steps of develop- 


HOW THE CHASM WAS BRIDGED 125 


ment from this crude stage in the use of weapons 
would be the selection of stones suited by size and 
shape for throwing, and the choice of clubs of 
suitable length and thickness, the latter being 
stripped of their twigs. 

For a long time fresh weapons, those immedi- 
ately at hand, would be seized and used for every 
new conflict; but as the idea of the superiority of 
some weapons to others arose, a second stage of 
evolution must have begun. The selected club, 
broken from the tree and prepared for use with 
some care, and thus embodying a degree of choice 
and labor, would be too valuable to fling idly away, 
and might be retained for future use, the first 
personal possession of inchoate man. Similarly, 
stones carefully chosen for their suitability for 
throwing would be probably kept, and a small 
store of them collected. In short, we may con- 
ceive of the man-ape thus gathering a maga- 
zine of weapons, —clubs and stones, — sought or 
shaped during hours of leisure for use in hours 
of conflict. In this way our animal ancestor 
doubtless slowly became a skilful hunter, carrying 
his weapons with him in the chase, and using them 
efficiently in the conquest of prey. 

A third stage in this progress was reached when 
to some wise-headed old man-ape came the idea 
of combining the two forms of weapon in use, of 
fastening in some way the stone to the club in 
order that a more effective blow might be struck. 


126 MAN AND HIS ANCESTOR 


The vegetable kingdom furnishes natural cords, 
flat stones with more or less cutting edges could 
be chosen and bound to the end of the club, and 
the earliest form of the battle-axe would be pro- 
duced. With its formation the man-ape made an- 
other important step of progress and added greatly 
to his powers of offence. Stage by stage he was 
bringing his animal competitors under his control. 

The formation of an axe or hatchet, however 
crude it may have been, would naturally lead to 
another step in advance. With it the ancestral man 
had passed beyond the possession of a weapon into 
the possession of a tool. The shaping of his clubs 
previously had been done by a rude tearing or 
hammering off of their twigs. These could now 
be cut off, and in addition the club might be 
wrought into a better shape. Manufacture had 
begun. Our ancestor stood at one end of a long 
line, at the other end of which we behold the 
steam-engine, the electric motor, and an intermina- 
ble variety of other instruments. 

Primitive manufacture was not confined to the 
shaping of wood. ‘The shaping of stone followed 
in duetime. Ifa tree branch could be made more 
suitable for its purpose by cutting it into shape with 
a rude stone axe or hatchet, a stone of better shape 
might be obtained by hammering. Doubtless the 
chipping effect of striking stone upon stone had 
been often observed before the idea arose that this 
could be made useful, and that where stones of the 


HOW THE CHASM WAS BRIDGED 127 


desired shape were not to be found, the shape of 
those at hand might in this way be improved. 

If we seek for some turning-point, some stage 
of progress, in which the man-ape fairly emerged 
into man, perhaps it would be well to select that 
which we have now reached, that in which the 
animal in question, which had hitherto used the 
objects of nature in their natural form, first gained 
the idea of manufacture and began to shape these 
objects by the use of tools. In truth, the dividing 
line between man-ape and man was imperceptibly 
fine. Various points of demarcation might be 
chosen, each founded on some important step in 
evolution. But among them all that in which the 
effort to convert the objects of nature into better 
weapons by the use of tools is perhaps the best, 
as it was probably the first step in that long pro- 
cess of manufacture to which man owes his wonder- 
ful advance. 

With this early effort at manufacture, man had 
reached a stage in which he was first able to make 
a permanent record of his existence upon the earth 
—aside from that of the very infrequent preser- 
vation of his bones as fossil remains. A chipped 
stone is a permanent object. Even a very rudely 
shaped one bears some indications of its origin 
upon its surface, some marks pointing back to 
man in his early days. Unfortunately for an- 
thropologists, natural agencies sometimes produce 
effects resembling those achieved by man’s hands, 


128 MAN AND HIS ANCESTOR 


and some degree of skill in manufacture and well- 
marked design is necessary before one can be sure 
that a seeming stone weapon has not been shaped 
by nature instead of man. Within a recent period 
research for the evidence of early man in the shape 
of chipped stones has been diligently made, with 
an abundance of undoubted and a number of doubt- 
ful results. Some of these reach very far back in 
time, and if actually the work of man he must have 
lived upon the earth as a manufacturing animal for 
years that may be numbered by the million. Seem- 
ingly chipped stones have been found that belong 
to the remote Miocene geological age. With the 
latter are some scratches upon bones that also seem 
the work of tools. But these Miocene relics are 
questionable. They do not seem to surpass the 
shaping power of nature herself. Unless some 
more indubitable relics are found, we must place 
the advent of man as a tool-using animal at a 
much later date. How far back he may have 
existed as a man-like biped is another question, 
which we are not likely soon to solve. 

It is scarcely necessary to pursue this branch 
of our subject farther. We have reached one end 
of a line of development, the succeeding course of 
which is well known. From the earliest rudely 
chipped stones and flints that are certainly the 
work of man, we can easily trace his progress up- 
ward through better examples of the chipped and 
later through those of the polished stone imple- 


HOW THE CHASM WAS BRIDGED 129 


ment, until the age of metal began. And with 
these stones have been found many other indica- 
tions of the progressing powers of man, in the 
shaping of bone, the invention and use of a con- 
siderable variety of implements and ornaments, 
and the earliest efforts of art, as stated in a pre- 
ceding section. There is no occasion to go into 
the detail of these steps of progress. When they 
are reached, this section of our work ends. We 
are concerned here simply with man’s ancestor 
and man in his earliest stage of existence, not with 
man in his later course of development. 


IX 


THE FIRST STAGE OF HUMAN EVOLUTION 


THE question has often been asked, if man has 
descended from an ape ancestor why is it that no 
traces of this ancestral form have been found in a 
fossil state? If man has gone through such an 
extended course of development, why has he left 
no remains? This question, looked upon as unan- 
swerable by many of those who ask it, is really 
of minor importance. A half-dozen answers, each 
of considerable weight, could easily be made to it. 
In the first place, it may be said that the absence 
of remains referred to is far from a single instance, 
but one out of thousands. It is generally admitted 
that the species of animals found fossil are very 
far from representing all the species that have 
existed upon the earth, and probably form but a 
minute percentage of them. In the second place, 
the remains of man’s ancestor have not been 
sought for in its native locality, the tropical re- 
gions. ‘In the third place, man belongs to the 
class of animals least likely to be preserved in the 
fossil state, since they dwell in the depths of for- 
ests and at a distance from the lakes and streams 


in whose muddy bottoms the remains of so many 
130 


FIRST STAGE OF HUMAN EVOLUTION 131 


animals have been fossilized. Another answer is, 
that of the various species of anthropoid apes that 
probably existed in the past, a few relics only of 
a single species have been found. If there were 
this one species alone, its number of individuals 
must have reached into the millions, yet of those 
hosts only a few fugitive bones are known to exist. 
There could not well be a more striking instance 
of the imperfection of the geological record. The 
sparse remains of Dryopithecus, the species in 
question, with some few other fossils of doubt- 
fully anthropoid species, save us from a total blank, 
and open the vista to a myriad of active arboreal 
creatures which had their dwelling-place in the 
old-time European forests, but have almost utterly 
vanished from human knowledge. 

These are not the only answers that can be made 
to the question propounded. Though the bones 
of the man-ape have not been found, relics of 
several stages of developing man exist. Most 
significant among these, until recently, was the 
celebrated Neanderthal skull, which in facial 
aspect departs widely from the ordinary human 
and approaches the simian type. More signifi- 
cant still is the Pithecanthropus cranium, indicative 
of an animal that stood midway between man and 
ape, a creature fully erect in posture, as its thigh 
bone proves, but with a brain that had attained but 
the halfway stage of development. In this nota- 
ble find we seem to see man in the making, the 


132 MAN AND HIS ANCESTOR 


body already fully man-like, the brain advanced 
much beyond the stage of the ape intellect, but 
still far below that of man. It is the remnant of a 
creature significantly on the dividing line between 
man-ape and man. 

So much for the response to the question as 
hitherto made. As the case stands, we are not 
obliged to stop at this point. Within the latter 
section of the nineteenth century discoveries have 
been made which fit in admirably with our argu- 
ment. Rediscoveries, perhaps, we should call them, 
for they were imperfectly known in ancient times, 
but only recently have they fairly come within 
human ken. We refer to the Pygmy tribes of the 
African forests, not definitely offered hitherto as 
aids to the elucidation of this problem, yet which 
seem to adapt themselves closely to it, and cer- 
tainly help essentially in filling the gap between 
civilized man and his ape-like ancestor. 

We have already said that there appear to have 
been two separate and distinct stages in the evolu- 
tion of man: one, that of his conflict with the 
animal world, ending in his mastery of the brute 
creation ; the second that of his conflict with nature, 
ending in his mastery of the resources of the earth. 
Overlapping and succeeding the second there has 
been a third, that of the conflict of man with man, 
ending in the survival of the fittest of the human 
race. In the discussion of this problem, as 
hitherto made, these distinct stages of evolution, 


FIRST STAGE OF HUMAN EVOLUTION 133 


with their intermediate resting stages, have not 
been recognized ; argument being based on man 
as a whole, and no thought directed to the pos- 
sibility that existing man may represent several 
separate processes of development, with broad 
lapses between. The argument we propose to 
offer is that man as he was at the completion of 
his first stage, that of the subjugation of the ani- 
mal world, and before the beginning of the conflict 
with nature, still exists, the first derivation from 
the man-ape, living in the location and possessing 
much of the appearance and many of the habits of 
this ancestral form. 

Late travellers in Africa have found more than 
trees and streams in the forest depths. They have 
found there a distinct and peculiar race of men, 
negro-like in many particulars, yet differing from 
the negroes in others, and specially marked by their 
dwarfish stature, which is indicated in the name of 
Pygmies, usually given them. These diminutive 
beings were known as long ago as the days of 
Homer, and their legendary combats with the 
cranes are spoken of by him in his poems. He was 
not aware of what is known now, that these forests 
dwarfs would disdain the cranes as antagonists, and 
are quite capable of overcoming the lordly elephant. 
In truth, they know no equals in the forest, and, 
while destitute of any knowledge of agriculture, are 
the most skilful, considering the primitive charac- 
ter of their weapons, of the hunters of the earth. 


134 . MAN AND HIS ANCESTOR 


The forest is the home of the Pygmy, as in all 
probability it was of the man-ape. He dwells in 
its deepest recesses, its moist and sultry depths, 
and pines when removed from his native realm in 
the heart of the tropic woods. In truth, he is 
almost as fully arboreal as was his tree-dwelling 
ancestor and as are his forest relatives, the anthro- 
poid apes of to-day; not inhabiting the limbs of 
trees, indeed, but living under their shade, and 
forming the true man of the woodland, the nomad 
hunters of the vast equatorial forests. It must be 
said, however, that this is not wholly the case. 
There are tribes seemingly belonging to this race 
in South Africa who dwell in the open desert, but 
retain there, in great measure, the habits of their 
forest kin. 

The first of modern travellers to see the Pygmies 
was Du Chaillu, in his journey through the Afri- 
can woodlands in 1867. He describes them as 
averaging four feet seven inches in height, their 
complexion of a pale yellow brown, the hair of 
their head short, but their bodies covered with a 
thick growth of hair, as if the loss of their ances- 
tral covering had not been completed. The tribe 
seen by him was known as the Obongo, and dwelt 
in Ashango Land, occupying the forest region 
between the Gaboon and the Congo. 

Dr. Schweinfurth, whose exploration extended 
from 1868 to 1870, was the next to meet these 
nomads of the forests, of whom he has given an 


FIRST STAGE OF HUMAN EVOLUTION 135 


interesting description in his ‘‘ Heart of Africa.” 
He met with them in the country of the Manbut- 
too, on the Welle River, between three degrees 
and four degrees north latitude. The tribe seen 
by him, known as the Akka, was made up of very 
diminutive individuals, none being over four feet 
ten inches high, and some only four feet. Their 
bodies were in due proportion to their height, so 
that they resembled half-grown boys in size. 

The Akkas, as described by him, have large 
heads, huge ears, and very prognathous faces. 
Their arms are long and lank, the chest flat and 
narrow, widening below to support a huge hanging 
abdomen, the legs short and bandy, and the walk 
a waddling motion, there being a sort of lurch with 
eachestep in this clatter respect theyarecall:the 
eibbon in its effort to walk. The gaping aspect 
of the mouth has a suggestive resemblance to that 
of the ape. They are also ape-like in their inces- 
sant play of countenance, twitching of eyebrows, 
rapid gestures of hands and feet, nodding and wag- 
ging of the head, and remarkable agility. Their 
skin is of a dull brown color, “like partly roasted 
coffee,” and destitute of the covering of hair seen 
by Du Chaillu on the Obongos. The hair of the 
head and the beard is scanty and of woolly tex- 
ture. 

Stanley, who frequently met those forest dwarfs 
in his expedition for the relief of Emin Pacha, 
gives much information concerning them in his 


136 MAN AND HIS ANCESTOR 


“In Darkest Africa.” ' He found;. indeedjmtwo 
types of dwarfs, one the Wambutti, who were -of 
attractive aspect, having large, round eyes, full and 
prominent round faces with broad foreheads, jaws 
slightly prognathous, hands and feet small, figures 
well formed though diminutive, and complexion of 
a brick red hue... The other type, the Akka, he 
describes as having ‘small, cunning, monkey eyes, 
close and deeply set.” One woman described by 
him had “protruding lips overhanging her chin, a 
prominent abdomen, narrow flat chest, sloping 
shoulders, long arms, feet strongly turned inward, 
and very short lower legs.’”’ She was “certainly 
deserving of being classed as an extremely low, 
degraded, almost a bestial type of a human being.” 
The language of the Akka is of a very undeveloped 
type, and seems a link between articulate and 
inarticulate speech. 

Stanley, in his journey down the Congo, heard 
many stories of the forest dwarfs, who were 
described to him as a yard high, with long beards 
and large heads. Other traditional accounts of 
them similarly speak of their long beards, though 
Stanley saw none answering to this description. 
The first individual seen by him in this journey 
was four feet six and a half inches high, and meas- 
ured thirty inches round the chest. He was of a 
light chocolate color, with a thin fringe of whiskers, 
his legs bowed and with thin shanks, the calf 
being undeveloped. His body was covered with a 


FIRST STAGE OF HUMAN EVOLUTION 137 


thick, fur-like hair, nearly half an inch long, in 
this respect agreeing with those described by 
Du Chaillu. 

The Batwas, seen and measured by Dr. Ludwig 
Wolfe in the middle Congo basin in 1886, were of 
an average height of four feet three inches. They 
resemble the Akka in general appearance, and 
have longish heads, long narrow faces, and small 
reddish eyes. They bounded through the tall 
herbage “like grasshoppers’ and were remarkably 
agile in climbing. 

For several years past there have been rumors 
of a race of Pygmies in the interior of the Came- 
roons, but these reports were not verified until the 
year 1898, when the Bulu expedition of the Ger- 
man military force succeeded, with much difficulty, 
in seeing several individuals of this race, secured 
through the aid of a native chief. One woman 
was measured and proved to be just four feet high. 
The color was from chocolate-brown to copperish, 
except the palms, which were of a yellowish white. 
The hair was deep black, thick, and frizzled; the 
skull broad and high; the lips full and swollen. 
Like other Pygmy tribes, these are very shy, 
wandering from place to place in the forest, and 
avoiding frequented routes of travel. They are 
skilful hunters and collect much rubber, which 
they dispose of to the negro tribes. 

In the same year Mr. Albert B. Lloyd made a 
journey in Central Africa, following Stanley’s 


138 MAN AND HIS ANCESTOR 


route down the Congo. He was alone, with the 
exception of a few carriers, and had the good 
fortune of passing through the country of the 
Pygmies and that of the cannibals of the Aruwimi 
without conflict or injury, entering into cordial 
relations with both peoples. He journeyed for 
three weeks in the Pygmy forest and had excellent 
opportunities for examining its inhabitants. 

After entering the great primeval forest Mr. 
Lloyd went west for five days without the sight of 
a Pygmy. Suddenly he became aware of their 
presence by mysterious movements among the 
trees, which he at first attributed to the monkeys. 
Finally he came to a clearing and stopped at an 
Arab village, where he met a great number of the 
diminutive nomads. “They told me,” says Mr. 
Lloyd, “that, unknown to me, they had been 
watching me for five days, peering through the 
growth of the forest. They appeared very much 
frightened, and even when speaking covered their 
faces. I asked a chief to allow me to photograph 
the dwarfs, and he brought a dozen together. I 
was able to secure a snap-shot, but did not suc- 
ceed in the time exposure, as the Pygmies would 
not stand still. Then I tried to measure them, 
and found not one over four feet in height. All 
were fully developed, the women somewhat slighter 
than the men. I was amazed at their sturdiness. 
The men have long beards, reaching halfway 
down the chest. They are very timid, and will 


FIRST STAGE OF HUMAN EVOLUTION 139 


not look a stranger in the face, their bead-like eyes 
constantly shifting. They are, it struck me, fairly 
intelligent. I had a long talk with a chief, who 
conversed intelligently about their customs in the 
forest and the number of the tribesmen. Both 
men and women, except for a tiny strip of bark, 
were quite nude. The men were armed with 
poisoned arrows. The chief told me the tribes 
were nomadic, and never slept two nights in the 
same place. They just huddle together in hastily 
' thrown-up huts. Memories of a white traveller, — 
Mr. Stanley, of course,— who crossed the forest 
years ago, st#ll linger among them.” 

The discovery of these forest Pygmies has di- 
rected attention to the Bushmen of South Africa, 
a desert-dwelling race, long known though com- 
paratively little regarded in their ethnological sig- 
nificance. They are now by many regarded as an 
outlying branch of the forest Pygmies, the chief 
difference being in the shape of the skull, which 
is rather long in the Bushmen, rather short in 
the Pygmies. These degraded wanderers inhabit 
an area extending from the inner ranges of the 
mountains of Cape Colony, through the central 
Kalahari desert, to near Lake Ngami, and thence 
northwestward to the Ovambo River. Into these, 
the most barren portions of the South African 
deserts, they have been driven by the encroach- 
ments of Kaffirs, Hottentots, and Europeans. 


140 MAN AND HIS ANCESTOR 


They closely resemble the Akka tribes of the 
north, averaging about four and a half feet in 
height, and possessing deep-set, crafty eyes, small 
and depressed nose, and a generally repulsive coun- 
tenance. Their complexion is of a dirty yellow. 
Their hair grows in small, woolly tufts. In the 
vicinity of Lake Ngami, Livingstone found them 
to be of larger stature and darker color, while 
Baines measured some in this region who were 
five feet six inches in height. In disposition the 
Bushmen are strikingly wild, malicious, and in- 
tractable, while their cerebral development is classed 
by Humboldt as belonging to almost the lowest 
class of the human species. 

Close in affinity with the Bushmen, and in vari- 
ous respects unlike the dark races around them, 
are the Hottentots, the original inhabitants of 
Cape Colony, a race of herdsmen who are much 
superior in culture to the degraded desert nomads. 
They are not dwarfish, being of medium stature, 
but they resemble the Bushmen in complexion, in 
which and in general cast of features they present 
some similarity to the Chinese. Their hair, like 
that of the Bushmen, grows in tufts, with spaces 
between, and they are like them in language, their 
method of speech consisting largely in a series 
of clicking sounds. Their manner of talking 
has been compared to the clucking of a hen, and 
by the Dutch to the “gobbling of a _ turkey- 
cock.” The Hottentots present every appearance 


FIRST STAGE OF HUMAN EVOLUTION. t41 


of being a developed branch of the Pygmy family, 
or the result of a cross between Bushmen and 
negroes. 

These tribes of dwarfs, now extended through- 
out the equatorial forests and over the South 
African deserts, were probably once far more 
widespread, inhabiting much of the continent and 
reaching as far as Madagascar, where a branch of 
them, known as Kinios or Quinias, are thought 
still to exist. They extended north to the Mediter- 
ranean, and have left their representatives in Mo- 
rocco in a tribe of dwaris, about four feet high, 
who differ widely in appearance from all other 
people of that country. As to their origin, there 
is a diversity of opinion. Some anthropologists 
look upon them as a primeval race, distinct from 
the negroes, who came among them later, Pro- 
fessor Virchow, on the contrary, is of the opinion 
that their only important difference from the 
negroes is that of size, and regards them as the 
remains of a primitive population from whom 
the negroes have descended. 

In a preceding section a statement was made as 
to what was the probable general appearance of 
the man-ape. It was based upon the physical 
aspect of the Pygmies, whom we hold to form 
the immediate derivative of man’s ape ancestor, 
and to have made no radical change in personal 
appearance, if we may judge from the various 
ape-like characteristics which they still present. 


142 MAN AND HIS ANCESTOR 


Mentally they have made a very considerable 
advance, and have reached the stage of men of 
low intellectual powers; but while their brains have 
been growing their bodies have not greatly changed, 
and the marks of their origin are thick upon them. 
There has probably been little change in size, the 
diminutive stature and small bodily dimensions 
being in accord with their incessant activity, while 
the difficulties of traversing the thick growth of the 
tropical forest may have helped to keep them small. 
As it is, they are of about half the size of civilized 
man, the weight of a full grown adult male being 
probably not over ninety pounds. 

Taking the Pygmies as a whole, it may be said 
that, though many of the Akkas are dispropor- 
tionate in shape and tottering in gait, on the whole 
these people are well made, their protuberant 
paunch being probably a result of their habits of 
eating. Captain Guy Burrows says that a Pygmy 
will eat twice as much as would suffice a full-grown 
man, and that one of them will devour a whole stalk 
of bananas at a meal, with other food. Some tribes 
are described as physically and mentally degener- 
ate, and prognathism is in many cases strongly 
declared, the lower part of the face having an ape- 
like contour, and the protruding chin, that feature 
peculiar to man, being very deficient. In their 
great abdominal development the adult Akkas re- 
semble the children of Arabs and negroes. This, 
therefore, seems the retention of a primitive feature 


FIRST STAGE OF HUMAN EVOLUTION 143 


which has become a passing characteristic in the 
more advanced types of mankind. 

The Pygmies are not destitute of intelligence, 
and are capable of receiving some of the elements 
of education. Two of them were brought to Italy 
about 1875, who within two years’ time learned to 
read and: write and to speak Italian with much 
fluency. They showed themselves superior in 
school studies to European children of ten or 
twelve years of age, and one of them became 
somewhat proficient in music. In their habits 
they resembled children, being sensitive and im- 
pulsive, fond of play, and very quick in their 
motions. Their readiness in gaining the elements 
of education is in accord with experience in the 
case of other savages. It is when studies requir- 
ing abstruse thought are reached that the facility 
in acquisition of the savage races comes to an end. 

With this consideration of the characteristics and 
habitat of the Pygmies we may proceed to a review 
of their habits. The weapons which they seem to 
have developed during their long upward progress, 
and to which their supremacy over the wild beasts 
of the forest is probably due, consist of two, the 
bow and arrow and the spear. The bow and ar- 
row are small and insignificant in appearance, and 
would be of little value but for the poison which 
the Pygmies have somehow learned how to obtain, 
and which makes them dreaded, not only by beasts, 
but by men. Wherever found, from the deserts of 


144 MAN AND HIS ANCESTOR 


the south to the forest of the Welle and Aruwimi 
on the north, the poisoned arrow is a mark of affin- 
ity as decided in its way as their physical resem- 
blance. Its wide distribution goes to indicate that 
it was the general weapon of the Pygmies ages 
ago, when, presumably, they had all Africa for 
their own, and ruled supreme over the animal 
world in that continent. 

It is true, indeed, that the use of the poisoned 
arrow is not peculiar to them, but is a somewhat 
common possession of savage tribes in all parts of 
the earth. This makes it quite possible that it 
was not original with the Pygmies, but was derived 
by them from other tribes. On the other hand, in 
view of its great value in giving them supremacy 
over the lower animals, it may well have been a 
primeval Pygmy invention, and these tribes the 
original source of its existing wide distribution. 

They possess more than one poison; one being 
a dark substance of the color and consistence of 
pitch, which is supposed to be made out of a 
species of arum. It is laid in the splints of their 
wooden arrows, or spread thickly upon their iron 
arrowheads, when they possess these. Another 
poison is of a pale glue color, which is supposed 
by Stanley to be made of crushed red ants. When 
fresh these poisons are deadly, producing excessive 
faintness, palpitation of the heart, nausea, and deep 
pallor, soon followed by death. In Stanley’s expe- 
rience one man died within a minute, from a mere 


FIRST STAGE OF HUMAN EVOLUTION 145 


pin prick in the breast. Others lived during dif- 
ferent intervals, extending up to one hundred 
hours. The difference in virulence seems to have 
depended on the degree of freshness of the venom, 
which apparently lost its strength as it became dry. 

The possession of a weapon so deadly as this, 
together with the agility and daring and the un- 
erring marksmanship of the forest dwarfs, seem 
sufficient to give them absolute control of the 
animals of the African wilds. The lion, the ele- 
phant, and the buffalo, the largest and fiercest of 
the beasts of field and forest, are powerless before 
the virulent venom of the arrows of the Pygmies, 
and doubtless for ages they have held dominion as 
the fearless rulers of wood and wild. Captain Bur- 
rows says of the skill with the bow of the Pygmy 
that “he will shoot three or four arrows, one after 
the other, with such rapidity that the last will have 
left the bow before the first has reached its goal.” 

The bow and spear are not their only means of 
_ obtaining food. They have certain of the arts of 
the trapper, perhaps original with them, perhaps 
borrowed from their larger neighbors. They sink 
pits in the pathways of their game, covering them 
with light sticks and leaves and sprinkling earth 
over the whole. They build hut-like structures, 
and lay nuts or plantains beneath, for the purpose 
of tempting chimpanzees, baboons, or other apes. 
A slight movement causes the hut to fall on the 


incautious animals. Bow traps are placed along 
L 


146 MAN AND HIS ANCESTOR 


the tracks of civets, ichneumons, and rodents, which 
snap and strangle them. The Pygmies do not 
hesitate to attack the elephant, spearing it from 
beneath, and hunting it for its ivory, which they 
trade with the settled tribes. In short, they are of 
unsurpassed agility, and are the best of woodsmen 
and hunters, their skill being taken advantage of 
by the settled tribes, who trade with them vege- 
tables, tobacco, spears, knives, and arrows for meat, 
honey, the feathers of birds, the ivory of the ele- 
phant, and other forest spoil. So destructive are 
they of game that they would soon denude the sur- 
rounding forest if they stayed long in one spot, 
so that they are compelled to move frequently. 
Schweinfurth speaks of them as cruel and fond 
of tormenting animals. 

They serve the settled natives in other ways, 
acting as scouts and informing them of the coming 
of strangers while still distant. Every forest road 
runs through their camps, their villages command 
every crossway, and no movement can take place 
in the forest without their knowledge, while they 
are adepts in the art of concealment. 

The superior woodcraft, the malicious disposi- 
tion, and the poisoned arrows and good marksman- 
ship of these forest folks make them formidable 
enemies, and the settled tribes hold them in dread 
and are glad to keep on good terms with them. 
Yet they find them much of a nuisance, since their 
dwarfish neighbors claim free access to their gar- 


FIRST STAGE OF ‘HUMAN EVOLUTION «147 


dens and plantain fields, where they help themselves 
to fruit in return for small supplies of meat and furs. 
In short, they are human parasites on the larger 
natives, who suffer from their extortions, yet fear 
to provoke their enmity. Burrows says that they 
will never steal, but that they pay very inadequately 
for the plantains they take, leaving a very small 
package of meat in return for an ample supply of 
food. 

The Pygmies build their camps two or three 
miles away from the negro villages, living in 
groups of sixty to eighty families. A large clear- 
ing may have eight to twelve of these Pygmy 
camps around it, with perhaps two thousand in- 
mates. Their dwellings are of the shape of an 
oval cut lengthwise, and are built in a rude circle, 
the residence of the chief occupying the centre. 
The doors are two or three feet high. On every 
track leading to the camp, at about one hundred 
yards’ distance, is a sentry house large enough to 
hold two of the little folks, its doorway looking 
up the track from the camp. While wandering in 
the forest they build the flimsiest of leaf shelters. 

The intelligence of the Pygmies is of a very low 
order. In the arts which they have been develop- 
ing for ages they are experts, they are thoroughly 
familiar with the habits of animals, and as hunters 
they are unsurpassed. But in intellect they are 
decidedly lacking. They are destitute of agricul- 
ture, possess no animals except a few dogs, and 


148 MAN AND HIS ANCESTOR 


have none of the elements of culture. The Bush- 
men, for instance, can count only up to two; all 
beyond that is “many.” Yet this low tribe of 
desert nomads is, as we have said, skilled in the 
art of drawing, its sketches of men and animals 
being widely distributed through Cape Colony. 

The Pygmies seem greatly lacking in the social 
sentiments. Burrows, in his “ Land of the Pygmies,” 
says that they do not possess even the most ordi- 
nary ties of family affection. Such common and 
natural feelings of affinity as those between mother 
and son, brother and sister, etc., seemed to be 
wanting in them. 

It is a fact of great interest that the Pygmy 
race does not seem confined to Africa, for tribes 
of men resembling the Pygmies in stature and in 
various other particulars are found in widely 
removed localities, as in Malacca, the Andaman 
Islands, and the Philippine Archipelago, while 
there are indications that they once spread widely 
over this island region of the earth. Those of the 
Philippines, known as Negritos or Aetas, have 
been somewhat closely observed and may be briefly 
described. 

The Negritos are similar in stature to the Pygmies 
of Africa, the men averaging four feet eight inches 
high, and they are like them in general appear- 
ance. ‘They are darker in complexion, some being 
as sable as negroes, and all of them darker than the 
African Pygmies. Their features are coarse and 


FIRST STAGE OF HUMAN EVOLUTION 149 


ill-shaped, their nose depressed, lips full, hair black 
and frizzled. In body, like the Pygmies, they are 
thin and spindle-legged. The calf of the leg is 
not developed in any of ‘these dwarfish people. 
The Negritos possess one marked and significant 
characteristic, — the separation of the great toe. 
This, while it has not the full power of movement 
shown in the apes, is much more separated from 
the others than in the whites, and can be readily 
used in grasping. By its aid the Negrito can not 
only pick up small objects, but can descend the 
rigging of a ship head downward, holding on 
like a monkey by his toes. It may be said that 
among uncivilized and barefoot people the great 
toe is usually very mobile. The artisans of Ben- 
eal can weave, the Chinese boatmen can row, with 
its aid, and it adds much to facility in climbing. 
The Negritos wear little clothing, have no fixed 
abodes, and pass a wandering life in the forests, 
living on game, honey, wild fruits, roots of the 
arum, and other forest food. Their weapons 
consist of a bamboo lance, a bow of palm wood, 
and a quiver of poisoned arrows. It is certainly 
a striking fact that, wherever found, from South 
Africa to the Far East, the Pygmy tribes possess 
the art of poisoning their weapons. This art 
is not practised by the surrounding peoples, and 
is the strongest evidence of a community of origin. 
It seems to point back to a remote period when 
the Pygmy peoples spread far through the tropics 


I50 MAN AND HIS ANCESTOR 


of the Eastern hemisphere, though in the region 
now under consideration they have almost vanished 
through the assaults of the Malays. 

The Negritos are very alert physically, being 
remarkably fleet of foot, while they can climb like 
monkeys. They live in groups of about fifty fami- 
lies, shelter being obtained by a simple erection 
of sloping poles and leaves, though in their more 
settled locations they built bamboo huts like those 
of the Malays. They are a short-lived race, sel- 
dom living more than forty years. Mentally, they 
are stupid and apparently incapable of improve- 
ment, seeming to stand at the foot of the human 
scale. Attempts to instruct them have been made, 
but all proved failures. Efforts to make agri- 
culturists of them have proved similarly futile. 
They are hereditarily hunters, and hunters they 
are likely to remain. 

The only Eastern locality of which the Pygmy 
race remained in full possession until recent times 
is that of the Andaman Islands. This is no longer 
the case. Great Britain made a penal settlement 
of these islands after the mutiny in India, and as 
a consequence the Mincopies, as their native in- 
habitants are called, have begun to disappear. 
These islanders are rather taller than the Philippine 
Negritos, ranging from four and a half to five feet 
in height, but otherwise there is a somewhat close 
resemblance between them. Their color is dark 
brown or black, their hair woolly, and inclined to 


FIRST STAGE OF HUMAN EVOLUTION {51 


grow in tufts, like that of the Bushmen. The 
head, though large in proportion to the body, is 
really very small and of low cranial capacity. 
That of the men is only 1244 cubic centimetres, 
as contrasted with 1554 cubic centimetres of a 
large number of male Parisians measured by Broca. 
That of the women differs in the same proportion. 
Flower says that the Mincopies rank lowest among 
the human races in this respect; but it must be 
remembered that the brain usually decreases in 
size with decrease in stature. 

Small as these islanders are, however, their 
strength is relatively great. They use with ease 
bows which the strongest English sailors cannot 
string, though practice may have much to do with 
this facility. And they can send arrows with a 
force that seems out of accord with their size. 
Their agility is remarkable. Travellers speak of 
the speed of the bullet in describing their running 
— doubtless with some exaggeration. Their senses 
are strikingly acute. It is said that they can dis- 
tinguish fruits by their odor when hidden in the 
foliage of the jungle, and have wonderful powers 
of sight and hearing. As in the case of the Aetas, 
their life is short, though the age of puberty is 
nearly as great as with us. Fifty is extreme old 
age with these people, and twenty-two is said to 
be their average length of life. 

Mentally, they are at a low level, the lowest, in 
the opinion of Owen, among the races of mankind. 


152 MAN AND HIS ANCESTOR 


In counting they have words for only one and two, 
but can count up to ten by touching the nose with 
each of the fingers in succession, saying each time, 
“this one also.” Their language is of a primitive 
type, and in various respects they manifest low 
intellivence: )2 Yet, as sin’ thev’easevol them ickae 
mentioned, they can be taught to the level of other 
children of twelve or fourteen years. Their mind, 
in the opinion of Dr. Brander, seems rather to be 
asleep than incapable. One child was taught to 
read and write, and to speak English fluently, and 
gained some knowledge of arithmetic; and this 
was not an exceptional case. 

It does not seem at all remarkable, when we con- 
sider the ease with which monkeys can be taught 
many arts and acts new to them, that those dwarf- 
ish men, like other savages, greatly superior as they 
are in brain power to the apes, should be capable 
of acquiring the minor elements of education. It 
is not what they can be taught, but what they 
have taught themselves, that we must consider in 
assigning them to their comparative place in intel- 
lectual development. In this respect the Minco- 
pies are on a very low plane. They have not 
even acquired the art of making a fire, though this 
is almost universal with mankind. All they know 
is how to keep a fire alive, and in this they are 
very assiduous. It is probable that they may have 
obtained fire at first from volcanoes on neighboring 
islands. 


FIRST STAGE OF HUMAN EVOLUTION 153 


They are lacking, like the Pygmy races in gen- 
eral, in the art of chipping stone, one of the earli- 
est arts acquired by man. Their only means of 
shaping stone is to put it into the fire until it 
breaks or splinters, when they can use the sharp 
splinters for their purposes. They are quite desti- 
tute of the art of drawing, and have no means of 
communicating their thoughts except by speech. 

Yet with these deficiencies, they have made some 
progress in the industrial arts. They make wooden 
vessels, and can produce pottery which stands the 
fire and in which they cook most of their food. 
They make nets of considerable size, which they 
use to fish with in the narrow streams. They have 
arrows and harpoons, whose points are fastened to 
the shaft by a long cord. The fish or land animal 
struck unwinds this cord in trying to get away, 
and its speed being checked by the shaft which it 
drags along, it is easily caught. 

The Mincopies possess boats, and these seem to 
have been early possessions of the Negrito popula- 
tions, by whose aid they were able to migrate from 
island to island. Their canoes have nautical quali- 
ties which have astonished English sailors. At 
one time they were probably bold and daring fisher- 
men and navigators, until driven to the forests and 
mountains by the invasion of the Malays. 

As the Pygmies were in all probability the aborigi- 
nes of Africa, so the Negritos appear to have been 
the aboriginal people of the Eastern islands, if not 


154 MAN AND HIS ANCESTOR 


of India. Quatrefages, in his work “The Pyg- 
mies,” finds reason to believe that even at the pres- 
ent day traces of them, pure or mixed, can be found 
from southeast New Guinea to the Andaman Isl- 
ands, and from the Sunda Islands to Japan. On 
the continent their range extends, according to 
him, “from Annam and the peninsula of Malacca 
to the western Ghauts, and from Cape Comorin to 
the Himalayas.” 

In one part of India the Negrito-like population 
are called LBander-lokh (literally ‘‘man-ape”’) by 
the neighboring tribes. The Semangs of Malacca 
are jet-black in color, with thick lips, flat nose, 
and protruding abdomen. In regard to the charac- 
teristic of prognathism, it is possessed in various 
degrees, the most pronounced instance being seen 
in the photograph of one of the Kalangs of Java,a 
tribe which has recently become extinct. The face 
of this individual is strikingly ape-like in profile. 

Everywhere that these dwarfish people are 
found, whether in Africa, India, or Malaysia, they 
present the appearance of being an aboriginal 
race, now largely annihilated by the incursions 
of larger and better-armed people, but once wide- 
spread and numerous. As to their place of origin, 
whether in Africa, India, or the island region, it is 
useless to speculate, as the facts on which an opin- 
ion could be based are not known. Wherever 
found they are in close relation to the black races, 
the negroes of Africa, the Papuans of Polynesia, 


FIRST STAGE OF HUMAN EVOLUTION 158 


and evidences of a considerable degree of mixture 
of races exist. This is especially the case in Poly- 
nesia and India, where the Negritos appear to 
shade off into the full-sized blacks through an 
intermediate series of half-breeds. 

Yet one fact of ethnological importance needs 
to be mentioned. The Negritos and Pygmies are 
everywhere brachycephalic, or short-headed, with 
the exception of the Bushmen, who are dolicho- 
cephalic, or partially so. Negroes and Papuans 
are strongly dolichocephalic. In this respect the 
Pygmy peoples agree more closely with the short- 
headed Mongolian or yellow races than with the 
long-headed negro or black races, though in general 
features they come near the latter. 

In truth, this race of dwarfs may be the primi- 
tive stock from which the Mongolians branched off 
on the one hand, and the Negroes on the other, since 
they are in some measure intermediate between the 
two. Latham says of the Rajmalis mountaineers, 
“Some say their physiognomy is Mongolian, others 
that it is African.” Quatrefages is strongly of 
the opinion that the negro is of Indian origin, 
and reached Africa through migration. He bases 
his opinion on the negroid characters of existing 
tribes in India, Persia, and elsewhere in Asia, and 
on the similar characters of the aboriginal Polyne- 
sians. As regards the Pygmies, they probably 
spread over the whole of this section of the earth 
at a period of remote antiquity, and very long ago 


156 MAN AND HIS ANCESTOR 


developed the racial differences which appear to 
exist between separate tribes. Distinctions of this 
kind can be seen in the East, and a marked one is 
pointed out by Stanley between the Wambutti and 
the Akka, as already stated. 

Wherever found the Pygmies are hunters, usu- 
ally making the deep forest their home, and 
are masters through their agility, cunning, and 
deadly weapons of the whole world of lower ani- 
mals. Physically they are probably not far re- 
moved from the man-ape, their remote ancestor, for 
they retain various ape-like characters, as in aspect 
of face, shape of body, occasional hairiness, diminu- 
tive size, shortness of legs, imperfect development 
of the calf, occasional waddling gait in walking, and 
the other particulars above pointed out. There are 
certainly abundant reasons for believing them to 
be, as we have suggested, the final result of the 
first great conflict in the evolution of man, that with 
the lower animals. 

This assured mastery once gained, the occasion 
for further development of this people ceased 
while they remained in the forest habitat which 
they had inherited from their ape ancestors. Here 
the problem of food getting was fully solved and 
there was nothing to instigate any new step in 
evolution. The period of conflict ended, a period 
of rest supervened, and, so far as the Pygmies are 
concerned, this period still continues. Though 
later races, their probable descendants, have left 


a] 


FIRST STAGE OF HUMAN EVOLUTION 157 


the forest and set up new stages of development 
through new conflicts with adverse conditions, the 
Pygmies remain in their resting state, and, if left 
to themselves, might continue in this state for ages 
in the future as they have done for ages in the 
past. As the case now stands, however, annihi- 
lation threatens some of them, while educative 
and other influences from without may bring to 
an end the physical and mental isolation of the 
others. 

In considering the Pygmies as they exist to-day, 
in fact, it is impossible to say how far their habits 
and possessions are original with themselves and 
how far they have been derived from others. 
There can be no question that they have been 
influenced by the customs of surrounding peoples 
of higher culture, and that they have received im- 
plements and methods from without. To get down 
to the pure Pygmy, as an outcome of evolution 
within himself, we would need to strip off all these 
adventitious aids, if we could distinguish them from 
the conditions native to the race, and thus behold 
him as he was before he fell under the influence 
of men of higher grade. Were it possible to iso- 
late him in this way, and present his original self, 
we should have before us an ethnological speci- 
men of the highest interest and importance, as the 
ultimate resultant of the first great stage in the 
evolution of man from his ape ancestor. 


xX 


THE CONFLICT WITH NATURE 


Ir has been a frequently debated question 
whether man comprises a single species or two 
or more species of animal descent. If a line be 
drawn from the Gold Coast in tropical Africa to 
the steppes of Tartary in central Asia, it will 
present two markedly distinct races of men at its 
two extremities. At its southwestern end we find 
the most long-headed, prognathous, frizzly-haired, 
dark-skinned race of mankind. At its northeast- 
ern end is the most round-headed, orthognathous, 
straight-haired, and yellow-skinned race. Midway 
between these appear intermediate peoples, with 
heads round, oval, or oblong, hair straight or curly, 
skin fair or dark, faces upright or protruding, men 
possibly, to judge from their physical character, a 
result of the amalgamation of these two distinct 
races. 

These differences may be the result of original 
difference in species or may be due to climatic and 
other influences of nature. Some writers accept 
the one view, some the other, and neither is sus- 
tained by any great weight of facts. The Pygmy 


race presents somewhat similar differences. Usu- 
158 


LAEACONALICL MIVITMY NAT ORE I59 


ally round-headed, these small men are in some 
instances long-headed, while such marked distinc- 
tions appear at times that Stanley classed two 
neighboring tribes as separate races. Here they 
present features of the Mongolian, there they are 
similar to the Negro. This goes to indicate that 
the distinction between the Negro and the Mon- 
eolian began far back in time, but it does not prove 
that it is the result of original difference in species, 
or that two distinct forms of ape separately devel- 
oped into man. While this is quite possible, the 
theory of a single species has been most widely 
accepted. The chief writers on the subject think 
that the differences arose during that undeveloped 
stage of mankind when resistance to the transform- 
ing influences of nature was still weak, and when 
the structure of the human frame may have yielded 
readily to agencies which would have little or no 
effect upon it now. 

Of one thing we can be sure, which is that there 
was a wide migration of the apes in remote times. 
Leaving the tropics, many species spread to the 
north, extending into Europe, which at that time 
seems to have been connected by land bridges 
with Africa, and spreading far through Asia. 
There was probably nothing at that time in atmos- 
pheric conditions to check such a migration. The 
Tertiary climate of Europe is believed to have been 
quite mild. And the ape family is by no means 
necessarily confined to warm regions. Monkeys 


160 MAN AND HIS ANCESTOR 


are found to-day at high elevations on the moun- 
tains of India, enduring the chill of ten thousand 
feet of altitude. 

Of the migration to Europe abundant evidence 
exists, fossil remains of monkeys having been 
found in many localities of that continent. Among 
these residents of early Europe was at least one 
representative of the anthropoid apes, the fossil 
species known as Dryopithecus, from the middle 
Miocene deposits of St. Gaudens, France. This 
species, apparently most nearly allied to the chim- 
panzee, was taller than any existing ape. Two or 
three other fossil remains, possibly of anthropoid 
apes of smaller size, have been found, and Europe 
seems to have been well supplied with apes of a 
considerable degree of development at a remote 
geological period. Among those may have been 
the form we have designated the man-ape, the 
ancestor of the human race, though no fossil relic 
attributable to such a species has been recognized. 

Coming down to a much lower period, we begin 
to find traces of man, first in his rudely chipped 
and later in his polished stone weapons and tools. 
And the bones of man himself appear, extending 
through what is known as the Quaternary or Pleis- 
tocene period. Nearly all these remains have 
been preserved by the art of burial, a fact indicat- 
ing some degree of mental progress, though their 
residence in caves and the rudeness of their imple- 
ments are evidence that the race was still low in 
culture. 


THE CONFLICT WITH NATURE 161 


An interesting fact in connection with these 
ancient human remains is that most of them indi- 
cate a small race, with narrow skulls and progna- 
thous jaws, recalling the Pygmies in general 
structure. This rude and small race continued 
until a late period of prehistoric time. It extended 
down from the cave bear and mammoth period 
through the later reindeer period, as is proved by 
discoveries made in the caves of the Belgian 
province of Namur. And there is good reason 
to believe that it continued into the age of bronze, 
for the small size of the handles of bronze weapons 
show they must have been intended for men with 
small hands. 

These diminutive people seem to have been not 
over four feet eight inches high. They were not 
alone, however. Men of normal height were in 
Europe with them. The northward migration of 
the Pygmies seems to have been accompanied or 
followed by that of a full grown people. Yet the 
Pygmies have held their own in Europe as in Africa, 
with certain modifications. In Sicily and Sardinia, 
which form part of a supposed former land bridge 
between Africa and Europe, a small people about 
five feet high still exist, whom Dr. Kollman looks 
upon as representing a distinct race, the prede- 
cessors of the tall Europeans. In the Lapps of 
northern Europe we possess another small race, 
possibly the lineal descendents of the Quaternary 
Pygmies. Everywhere the small man has been 

M 


162 MAN AND HIS ANCESTOR 


forced to retire into forests, deserts, and icy bar- 
rens before the taller and stronger man. The 
folk-lore of Europe is full of traditions of a race 
of dwarfs, and its conflict with men of larger mould, 
and there are various indications that this race 
was once widespread. 

What has been said here of the migration of 
man into Europe and his development in that 
country is preliminary to a consideration of the 
second great stage of human development, that 
due to the conflict with nature. The conflict with 
the animal world appears to have ended in the 
production of a dwarfish, forest-dwelling variety 
of man, in the lowest human stage of mental evo- 
lution. The conflict with nature ended in the de- 
velopment of a full-sized variety of man, dwelling 
largely in the open country and much superior in 
intellect, as indicated by his higher powers of 
thought and advanced degree of organization. 

The conflict with nature took several forms, in 
accordance with the conditions of the several 
regions inhabited by man. Its result was to 
subdue nature to the use and benefit of mankind, 
and the methods, in the tropical localities of origi- 
nal man, consisted in the reduction of animals to 
the domestic state and a similar domestication of 
food plants. In other words, one of its early stages 
was the development of the herding habit, while a 
far more important one was that of the appearance 
of the agricultural industries. In Europe a third 


THE CONFLICT WITH NATURE 163 


and still more vigorous influence supervened, that 
of the conflict with cold and man’s gradual adapta- 
tion to the conditions of a frigid climate. 

If the nomad dwarfs were the aboriginal men, 
all later races must have developed from them. 
While remaining in the forest and retaining their 
primitive habits, the Pygmies presented an instance 
of arrested evolution. For a new development to 
begin it was necessary to abandon the old locality 
and with it the old habits, and this they probably 
began to do at a remote period. When, indeed, 
the earth was their dominion, there was no reason 
for their remaining restricted to a forest residence, 
as they have been since the larger races took pos- 
session of the open country. We do not need to 
go back far in time in the East to find the Pygmy 
race in full control’ of the Philippine and other 
islands, and probably of Malacca and parts of 
Hindostan. Their present restriction and partial 
extermination have been due to the incursions of 
the warlike Malays. The Andaman Mincopies 
remained undisturbed until a recent date, and 
added fishing to their hunting pursuits. And the 
canoes which these islanders now possess were 
probably the invention of their race, and furnished 
the means by which the aborigines spread from 
island to island of those thickly studded seas. 

In Africa the only existing indication of a mi- 
eration of the forest folk into the open country is 
found in the Bushmen and Hottentots of the far 


164 MAN AND HIS ANCESTOR 


south. The former, confined to the desert, remain 
nomad hunters and present no step of advance be- 
yond the Akka and other equatorial tribes. The 
Hottentots, on the contrary, have made an impor- 
tant step of progress. While still nomads and 
addicted to hunting, they have domesticated cattle 
and sheep and become essentially a herding people, 
though mentally the lowest race of herders on the 
face of the earth. i 

With this change in habits, the Hottentots have 
significantly increased in stature. While still of 
medium height, they are considerably larger than 
their Bushmen kindred, to whom they present a 
close resemblance in other respects. This increase 
in size is a common result of a change in habits 
which insures a fuller supply of food with less 
strain upon the muscular organization in obtaining 
it; a fact of which the lower animal world is full 
of illustrations. The life of the forest and desert 
hunters is one of incessant activity, and their food 
supply is precarious. The Hottentots, on the con- 
trary, take life easily and are inclined to indolence, 
their herds supplying them with food in abundance 
with little exertion. They retain enough of the pri- 
meval strain to be fond of hunting, and while thus 
engaged display the activity of their ancestral race, 
but ordinarily they pursue an idle, wandering life, 
and their increase in size may well be a result of 
their change in habits. 

The Hottentots, while still low in the human 


THE CONFLICT WITH NATURE 165 


scale, are mentally a stage in advance of the Bush- 
men, they having a more developed social organiza- 
tion and superior powers of thought. The latter 
is indicated by their myths and legends, of which 
they have a considerable store, though they are in 
great measure destitute of religious conceptions, 
such religion as they possess taking in great part 
the primitive form of ancestor worship. Under 
the influence of Europeans they are gradually 
abandoning their old habits and adopting those of 
civilized life, but while improving in social and 
industrial conditions there is little evidence of 
intellectual advance. 

The development in method of food-getting dis- 
played by the Hottentots was really but the com- 
pletion of the old battle for dominion with the 
animal host. It consisted in subjecting some of 
the docile herbivora more fully to human master- 
ship. The hunter has to do with hostile beasts, 
victims but not servants of man. The herder has 
reduced some of these animals to servitude, and no 
longer has to overcome them through the arduous 
labors of the chase. He is able to obtain, as we 
have said, more food with less exertion, a larger 
population can live in a limited district, and the 
beneficial effects upon the mind of a closer social 
intercourse are shown. 

But the most important event in this stage of 
evolution was the subjection of the plant world to 
man. For ages of interminable length this was 


166 MAN AND HIS ANCESTOR 


not thought of. Fruits and other vegetable prod- 
ucts formed part of man’s food; but these were the 
growth of wild nature, and the plant world was 
left to its own will, with no effort to bring it under 
human control. There is nothing to show that the 
idea of agriculture ever entered the mind of a 
Pygmy. Of the-plants surrounding him, far the 
greater number were useless for food, only the few | 
were available; but the conception of favoring the 
few at the expense of the many apparently never 
occurred to him. There is, indeed, some crude 
and simple agriculture pursued by a few of the 
Negritos of Luzon, but evidently as an imitation of 
the Malay agriculture or as a result of direct teach- 
ing, certainly not as an original conception. The 
conflict of the Pygmies with nature has been con- 
fined to the animal world, and reached its highest 
level in the herding industries of the Hottentots. 
Where and when the subjugation of the plant 
world began it is impossible to say. It very prob- 
ably had its origin in the fertile open lands of the 
tropics. But that it originated in the central region 
of Africa, or that the agriculturists of that region 
were of native origin, are both subjects open to 
question. The forest folk may have spread into 
the open country, there developed a crude agricul- 
ture, favored the growth of food plants at the 
expense of useless shrubs and trees, and gradually 
advanced in this new form of industry. This 
would be in accordance with the opinion of Vir- 


THE CONFLICT WITH NATURE 167 


chow, who looks upon the negro as the descendant 
of the Pygmy. No great change was necessary to 
convert the one into the other. The Pygmy is 
negro-like in cast of countenance and bodily forma- 
tion. He differs in size, in complexion, and in 
shape of head. But new conditions may have 
given rise to these differences. The fierce suns 
of the African lowlands may well have caused an 
increased deposit of pigment, changing the yellow- 
ish hue of the Pygmy to the deep black of the 
negro. An increase in size is a natural result 
when exertion diminishes and food increases. 
And a tendency for the head to change from the 
short to the long shape is shown in the Bushmen. 

On the other hand, certain anthropologists, of 
whom we may name Quatrefages, take an oppo- 
site view, and believe that the negroes migrated 
from Asia or the Eastern islands to Africa, being, 
like the negro-like Papuans, descendants of the 
sable or dark brown Negritos of the East. In this 
case agriculture may have originated in Asia and 
have been brought by migrants to Africa. All we 
know historically concerning it is that the earliest 
traceable seats of agriculture appear to have been 
the fertile valleys of India, Babylonia, and Egypt. 
But the known culture of the earth in these regions 
goes back only a few thousands of years, while for 
the first crude stages of agriculture we must prob- 
ably measure years by tens of thousands. 

The degree of subjection of nature to man’s 


168 MAN AND HIS ANCESTOR 


needs, as displayed in tropical agriculture, was com- 
paratively small, and its effect on the development 
of the human intellect, while important, was lim- 
ited. It had the highly useful result of a great 
increase in population, the growth of village and 
town life, an advance in social relations, and the 
beginning of political relations. New implements 
were needed, better houses were erected, the set- 
tled condition of the people gave rise to direct 
efforts at education, and added the important 
element of commerce, in its earliest form, to the 
industries of mankind. The result must have been 
a fresh start in the development of the intellect, 
though one that probably soon reached its culmi- 
nating point in the central tropics. 

The highest results of the development of agri- 
culture in tropical countries, unaided by secondary 
influences, seem to have been those existing in the 
highly fertile regions of Egypt and Babylonia at 
the opening of the historical period. The density 
of population in those countries, due to their pro- 
lific production of food stuffs, gave rise to con- 
siderably developed political and social institutions, 
and laid the foundations for a great subsequent 
advance under the influence of warfare, invasion, 
and the other more potent causes of human prog- 
ress. Only for such ulterior influences the agri- 
culturists of these countries would perhaps to-day 
remain dormant in the stage of mental progress 
they had attained ten thousand years ago. 


THE CONFLICT WITH NATURE 169 


In considering the existing conditions of the 
forest nomads and the African agriculturists, it is 
not safe to credit them with the origination of all 
the arts and implements they possess. The negroes, 
for instance, have been for ages in more or less 
close association with the Pygmies, and may have 
taught them many things which they would not 
have attained through their own limited powers of 
thought. The bow and poisoned arrow are very 
likely original with them. They possess this 
weapon throughout the wide range from the Afri- 
can Hottentots to the Philippine Negritos, while it 
is not a weapon of the surrounding peoples. The 
spear is probably also original. The same cannot 
safely be said of their traps and snares for game. 
These seem beyond their power of invention, and 
may well have been taught them by the negro tribes. 
Their habitations, aside from the mere leaf shelters, 
had probably a similar origin. In Africa the huts 
doubtless had their model in those of the negroes. 
In the Philippines they are pile-supported bamboo 
huts of the pattern of those of the Malays. If, 
then, we take from the forest folk the arts taught 
them or imitated by them, we reduce them to a 
very low level of intellect and a remarkable paucity 
of products from their own powers of thought. 

Similar reasoning may be applied to the settled 
natives of Africa. For thousands of years past 
they have been in contact on their northern bor- 
ders with civilized peoples, numerous immigrants 


170 MAN AND HIS ANCESTOR 


have made their way into the country, and a con- 
siderable degree of amalgamation has very likely 
taken place. We cannot, therefore, safely credit 
them with all the arts and implements they possess 
nor with all their political and social progress. No 
doubt much came to them from without, much 
was taught them from within, and a mixture of 
blood with superior races may have aided consider- 
ably in improving their stock. We are justified, 
then, in their case as in that of the Pygmies, in 
believing that their stage of mental and social 
development is only in part original with them, 
and is largely due to the influences of education 
and amalgamation. 

The pure negro is not a very numerous element 
of the population of Africa. He stands in a meas- 
ure intermediate between the nomad Pygmies of 
the forest and the desert, and the mixed races 
who may be called negroid but cannot strictly be 
called negro. With their foreign blood, most of 
these have obtained foreign arts and elements of 
culture, and stand at a distinctly higher physical 
and mental level than the unamalgamated negro. 

For the pure or nearly pure negro we must 
seek the lowlands of the Guinea coast, the seat of 
the most pronounced existing negro type. Other 
localities are in the region of the Gaboon, along 
the lower Zambesi, and in the Benue and Shari 
basins., Here we find. the true native; African: 
a race strikingly uniform in aspect, and, next to 


Lit CONLLIC EL WITHVNA TORE 171 


the Pygmies, the lowest in physical characteristics 
of mankind. The features of structure in which 
the negro appears to occupy a position interme- 
diate between the white man and the man-ape — 
lower than the former and approaching the latter 
—are the following: First, his abnormal length 
of arm, which averages about two inches longer 
than that of the Caucasian, and, when in the erect 
position, sometimes reaches the knee-pan, being 
little shorter proportionately than that of the 
chimpanzee. Second, his prognathism, or projec- 
tion of the jaws — his index of facial angle being 
about 70, as compared with the Caucasian 82. 
Third, his weight of brain—average European 
45 ounces, negro 35, highest gorilla 20. Fourth, 
his short, flat, snub nose, deeply depressed at 
the base, wide and with dilated nostrils at the ex- 
tremity. Fifth, his thick protruding lips. Sixth, 
his high and prominent cheek bones. Seventh, his 
great thickness of cranium, which resists blows 
that would break the skull of an average European. 
Eighth, the weakness of his lower limbs, the broad, 
flat foot and low instep, the projecting heel and 
somewhat prehensile great toe. 

These characteristics the negroes possess in com- 
mon with the Pygmies and the Negritos. Others 
of less significance could be named. One impor- 
tant character is that of the cranial sutures, which 
close much earlier in the negro than in higher races, 
thus checking the development of the brain while 


172 MAN AND HIS ANCESTOR 


the body is still growing. To this many ascribe 
the mental inferiority of the negro race. A close 
observer records, as a result of long observa- 
tion on the plantations of the southern United 
States, that “the negro children were sharp, 
intelligent, and full of vivacity, but on approach- 
ing the adult period a gradual change set in. The 
intellect seemed to become clouded, animation 
giving place to a sort of lethargy, briskness yield- 
ing to indolence.”’ This is very probably the case 
with the Pygmies, who similarly reach a mental 
limit beyond which they cannot advance; but this 
limit is set in the adult period. In other words, 
the adult Pygmy is on the mental level of the 
negro child. If the African Pygmy is as short 
lived as his Eastern congener, he does not survive, 
as a rule, many years beyond the age of adoles- 
cence, and continues in a stage of childhood, men- 
tally considered, until death. 

The conclusion to be derived from this interest- 
ing fact would appear to be that the negro has 
made a distinct and important advance mentally 
beyond the Pygmy, reaching at adolescence the 
limit of mental evolution which the Pygmy reaches 
at death. But the negro stops here, or goes little 
beyond this limit. His cranial sutures close, the 
growth of the brain is arrested, and the develop- 
ment of his mind comes to anend. In the white 
the brain continues to expand, and the closing of 
the sutures takes place later in life. Probably the 


LHE CONFLICT, WITH NATURE 173 


latter is a result of the former, mental development 
having overcome the tendency of the sutures to 
close in early life. It may be further said of the 
negro that, mentally, he is emotional far more than 
intellectual, and unmoral rather than immoral, he 
being apparently incapable of comprehending the 
moral conceptions of advanced man. 

If we seek the Malaysian and Australasian 
region of the Eastern seas, we find there another 
branch of the negro race, similarly in contact with, 
and apparently derived from, a Pygmy stock. 
This Papuan race of blacks covers a wide island 
region, but, like the African race, has become 
_ greatly modified by mixture with alien peoples, 
largely of Malay origin. Its purest type is to be 
found in New Guinea, where it approaches the 
negro in general character, though with distinctive 
features of its own. 

The Papuan is of medium height; fleshy rather 
than muscular; color a sooty brown; forehead 
high, but narrow and retreating; nose sometimes 
flat and wide at nostrils, but oftener hooked 
with depressed point; lips thick and projecting ; 
high cheek bones; prognathism general; hair 
black and frizzly. He is negroid in appearance, 
and is said to resemble the African of the coast 
region opposite Aden. 

We need not pursue this subject further. It 
will suffice to offer the general conclusion that the 
negroid race, while, through its change of habits 


174 MAN AND HIS ANCESTOR 


from the hunting to the agricultural status, it has 
made an advance both mentally and physically 
beyond the Pygmy aborigines, does not appear to 
have advanced greatly in either particular, the 
negro reaching a mental limit at a low level, and 
being arrested physically while still possessing 
marked characteristics of the man-ape. 

For the higher development of man, under the 
stress of a more energetic conflict with the condi- 
tions of nature, we must seek the continent of 
Europe, whose human inhabitants had not only to 
subdue the wild beasts and teach the earth to bring 
forth wholesome food in place of useless plants, 
but also to battle with wintry climates, and over- 
come the adverse influences of cold, sterility of 
soil, and other hostile conditions of the northern 
zones. 

One of the chief problems of biology has long 
been that of the production of new varieties and 
species of animals as an effect of gradual varia- 
tion in structure. This is believed to be ordinarily 
due to changes in the conditions of nature, animals 
and plants which have made accordant changes 
in structure being preserved, those which have not 
changed in accordance with the new conditions per- 
ishing. Where the conditions of nature remain 
uniform, species may persist for long ages un- 
changed, though even in the latter case changes in 
structure are apt to occur, since variation in spe- 
cies is not wholly dependent upon external changes. 


THE CONFLICT WITH NATURE 175 


To a considerable extent it is due to causes exist- 
ing within the organism itself, fortuitous variations 
being occasionally preserved when not out of har- 
mony with the state of affairs prevailing in the 
external world. Or variation may occur through 
the establishment of new relations between the 
species inhabiting some locality while inanimate 
nature remains uniform, or through migration into 
new inanimate or animate surroundings. Variations, 
in short, may arise under the influence of any change 
in the general environment which renders necessary 
adaptive changes in structure. But this adapta- 
tion in some cases takes place in the mind, new 
actions or methods of meeting the contingency 
being adopted which render physical changes un- 
necessary. The problem is a highly complicated 
one, and no doubt many causes have to do with 
the multiplicity of effects. 

There have very likely been many occasions 
where the changes in structure took place rapidly, 
in consequence of sudden variations in natural con- 
ditions. Such rapid changes in conditions neces- 
sarily exert a severe stress or strain on organisms, 
either destroying them or causing an equally rapid 
adaptation, physical or mental. In such instances 
it is likely that many species perish, the change 
demanded being too great; others escape by mi- 
gration to better fitted localities; and others, more 
mobile or less affected by the change, survive 
through adaptive variations. 


176 MAN AND HIS ANCESTOR 


Of such periods of strain upon organic nature 
we know of only one in recent geological times, 
that known as the Glacial Age, the vast variation 
in climate which took place when the ice of the 
Far North flowed down in mighty billows over 
northern Europe and America, burying every- 
thing beneath its crushing weight, and bringing 
many forms of life to a sudden and untimely end. 
No doubt a considerable number of species of ani- 
mals and plants perished before this frightful in- 
vasion. A notable instance among these was 
perhaps that of the American horse, which dis- 
appeared at about this period. Other species sur- 
vived by a retreat to more tropical regions, to 
return after the invasion had spent its force. Still 
others may have survived by adapting themselves 
to the changed conditions, emerging as new species 
or well-marked varieties. 

Among the beings which passed unscathed 
through this extraordinary change in climate was 
apparently man. And it seems safe to affirm 
that man’s contest with the glacial conditions, 
whose force was exerted upon his mind instead 
of on his body, was one of the most potent influ- 
ences in the evolution of the human race. Man 
entered the contest at a low level of mental devel- 
opment; he emerged from it at a comparatively 
high level. 

No one to-day questions that man was an in- 
habitant of Europe during the Glacial Age. The 


THE CONSLICT WITH NATORE 177 


proofs of this are too numerous and positive to be 
doubted. He may have inhabited America in the 
same period, though of this there still remains 
some doubt. Claims have been made of the dis- 
covery of evidences of man in Europe long before 
the glacial epoch, reaching as far back as the 
miuocenerand: even they viiocene Aven abucnthese 
claims have not been established beyond question, 
and the earliest generally acknowledged traces of 
man are confined to glacial Europe. 

Yet we are forced to acknowledge that if man 
existed in Europe during the prevalence of the ice 
avewues or, bis ancestor;*must have been’ there 
before that period. It is absolutely certain that 
no animal accustomed to tropical conditions would 
have chosen this period of extreme cold to migrate 
from the warm tropics to the frozen north. The 
fact that man was in Europe during glacial times 
is the very strongest evidence that he reached 
there during the milder preceding period, when 
a genial and uniform climate is believed to have 
prevailed throughout southern and central Europe. 
If we could accept as fact the seeming very ancient 
evidences of man’s handiwork, we would be obliged 
to consider him an inmate of Europe long ages 
before the glacial epoch. 

If, as there is reason to believe, the man of 
Africa at that remote period was the ancestor of 
the forest-dwelling Pygmy of to-day, lower in men- 


tal level and more bestial in aspect than any of his 
i 3 


178 MAN AND HIS ANCESTOR 


descendants, yet much advanced in mind beyond 
the man-ape of earlier ages, then we may with 
some assurance accept this as the type of the 
primitive man of Europe. He could have reached 
there by the land bridges which are thought to 
have connected Europe and Africa at that time, 
one closing the straits at Gibraltar, the other ex- 
tending south from Italy by way of Sicily. These 
were the routes by which the apes are supposed to 
have entered Europe, and by which man may well 
have followed in a laterage. It is possible, indeed, 
that man reached the northern continent from an- 
other locality, the habitat of the Negrito race in 
southeastern Asia and the Malaysian islands. The 
fossil man-ape of Java, Pithecanthropus, is a strong 
argument that this was the region, or one of the 
regions, in which the development of man took 
place. However this be, we can be assured that 
primitive man was far more likely to widen his 
field of occupation through migration than any 
other animal, and may conjecture that he spread 
over Europe and Asia in the mild preglacial times, 
and perhaps even reached America, giving rise to 
the early man of that hemisphere. 

The advent of man in Europe was not probably 
followed by any considerable intellectual develop- 
ment. The mild and equable climate which at 
that time seems to have prevailed, was not likely 
to make a stringent demand on his mental re- 
sources. Food was very likely abundant and eas- 


LHE CONFLICT WIlTH NATCORE 179 


ily obtained, animals of the chase being plentiful, 
and edible roots and fruits by no means lacking. 
Thus he could readily obtain the means of subsist- 
ence by aid of the arts and weapons employed by 
him in the tropical forests. It is not unlikely that 
some changes, both physical and mental, took 
place, but these were probably not great. There 
may have been some change in color and form, a 
first step toward the distinctions which separate 
the white from the black man, and a degree of 
mental adaptation to certain exigencies of the new 
situation ; but in neither direction were the varia- 
tions likely to be very decided. 

Such, as we conceive it, was the man of early 
Europe, in great measure a counterpart of the for- 
est nomad of the tropics of Africa and the East, 
the monarch of the animal kingdom, but not the 
lord of the earth. He may have made some prog- 
ress in the contest with inanimate nature. Vege- 
table food in his new home was less abundant 
than in his old, and the instigation to agricultural 
pursuits was stronger. And though Europe was 
thickly wooded, it probably presented more open 
land than Africa. Both the incitement to agri- 
culture and the facilities for its exercise were, in 
all probability, greater than in Africa, and man 
may have begun to cultivate the earth here at an 
earlier date than in his native realm. We are free 
at least to speculate that European man gained 
some slight knowledge of agriculture in the pre- 


180 MAN AND HIS ANCESTOR 


glacial period, but this is doubtful, and the relics 
of early man yield no evidence in its favor.. Men- 
tally it is questionable if he was advanced beyond 
the level of the least developed negro tribes, and 
perhaps not beyond that of the forest pygmies. 

But at length the shadow of a mighty coming 
change began to fall upon the fair face of Europe. 
Year by year the winters grew colder. The ice 
sheet, which was in time to bury half of Europe 
under its chilly mantle, had begun its slow move- 
ment toward the south. It advanced very slowly. 
Centuries elapsed during its deliberate march. 
Had it moved with rapidity, few animals could 
have survived its effects. Some of them found 
time for changes in structure to fit themselves to 
the new conditions. Others perished as the wintry 
chill increased. Constituted for tropical warmth, 
they were unable to endure severe cold. The apes 
and monkeys may have been among the early vic- 
tims. To-day the apes of Gibraltar are the only 
ones existing in a wild state in Europe, and it is 
doubtful if they are of an original stock. There 
is good reason to believe that escape by migration 
southward was cut off by the sinking of the ancient 
land bridges, so that the animals north of the Medi- 
terranean had no choice between adaptation and 
annihilation. 

Among the animals thus taken prisoner by the 
glacial chill was European man. He could not 
escape, and was forced to remain, exposed to the 


THE CONFLICT WITH NATURE I8I 


alternatives of perishing from cold and hunger, 
or fitting himself to endure the new conditions 
which were coming upon his northern home, per- 
haps the most adverse to animal life that had 
ever been known. Man was about to be subjected 
to an extraordinary strain, which he could only 
meet by an extraordinary adaptation. 

The changes by which he met these new con- 
ditions were in a very small degree physical; they 
were almost wholly mental. In all animals of the 
higher orders, adaptive variations are apt to be 
in a measure of this character, the body being re- 
lieved from the need of structural change through 
some new activity of the mind. In man this was 
undoubtedly the case in great, probably in very 
great, measure. There may have been an increase 
in size and strength, some variations in color, in 
the breathing organs, in power of resistance of the 
cuticle to cold, etc., but the principal physical 
change was in a growth of the brain and expan- 
sion of the cranium, giving rise to a less bestial 
physiognomy and an advanced mental power. 

One physical change that would seem necessary 
to enable an animal to endure severe cold, the devel- 
opment of a thick protective covering of fur or hair, 
did not take place in man. The change was more 
likely in the other direction, since the hairy cover 
which is possessed by many of the forest folk has 
disappeared. This loss of hair by man has been 
referred by Darwin to sexual selection, that power- 


182 MAN AND HIS ANCESTOR 


ful influence to which animals seem to owe so 
many physical structures of no apparent use, 
and some of them seemingly disadvantageous. 
In the case of man in the circumstances now 
under consideration, exposed without natural cov- 
ering to the growing chill of the advancing ice 
sheet, the influence of sexual selection would cer- 
tainly have found a strong counteracting force in 
natural selection, had not some other means of 
escaping the influence of the cold been found. 

As it was, the difficulty was undoubtedly over- 
came in great measure by the adoption of artificial 
clothing. The mind came to the aid of the body. 
The man who could chip a stone into the shape 
of an axe or spear head, was sufficiently advanced 
mentally to conceive the idea of covering his body 
with leaves fastened together in some way, with 
other vegetable fabrics, or with the skins of slain 
animals. Protection from the cold was also sought 
in caverns and rock shelters, and for a very long 
period man remained a cave-dweller. There is 
hardly a cavern in western Europe in which he has 
not left some trace of his residence. Where caves 
were not available, rude artificial shelters were prob- 
ably built. Even the orang builds a shelter of this 
kind, and we can readily conceive of man at a very 
early period making himself a shelter of leaves and 
boughs, from which, as the cold increased, he might 
easily evolve a hut composed of a wooden frame- 
work covered with skins such as he used for clothing. 


THE CONFLICT WITH NATURE 183 


When and where the most important of discov- 
eries, that of fire, was made, it is impossible to say. 
Fire arising from natural causes, such as confla- 
grations started by lightning, no doubt early taught 
man the advantage of this agency as a protection 
from cold, but the artificial production of fire was 
a process too intricate to be arrived at by undevel- 
oped man except as a result of accident. It has 
never been achieved, as we have seen, by the 
Andaman Mincopies. The rudiments of the fire- 
making art were possessed by primitive man. In 
chipping flints into arrow or lance heads sparks 
must frequently have been struck from the hard 
stone, and at times these may have fallen upon 
and kindled inflammable material. The rubbing 
requisite in shaping and polishing war clubs may 
have yielded a heat occasionally causing fire. In 
boring the holes necessary to make the needles 
found among primitive implements, a process re- 
sembling that of the fire-drill must have been 
employed. In short, it is not difficult to conceive 
of more than one way in which the fire-making art 
could have been gained by accident, though it may 
have been late in coming, since some, perhaps all, 
of the arts described were not attained until the 
Glacial Age. Once possessed, this important art 
would scarcely have been suffered to disappear. 
With its aid man could defy the effects of the 
glacial chill, so far as its direct action upon his 
body was concerned; and with it he also gained 


184 MAN AND HIS ANCESTOR 


a new and efficient means of defence against car- 
nivorous animals, which have ever since feared fire 
more than weapons. 

The discovery of methods of artificial fire-making 
was perhaps preceded by a utilization of the flames 
caused by lightning and other natural causes, the 
fire being conveyed by torches from hearth to 
hearth and kept alive with sedulous care. Even 
after artificial methods of fire-making were invented, 
our savage ancestors were exceedingly careful to 
keep their fires alive, as the Mincopies are to-day, 
and this heedful attention left its traces until very 
recent times. So important was the apparatus for 
kindling a flame deemed that in India the fire-twirl 
was made a god and became one of the chief deities 
of that polytheistic land. In many other places, 
especially in Persia, the element of flame was raised 
to the dignity of a deity and worshipped among 
the higher gods. Among the semi-civilized Ameri- 
cans the peril of the loss of fire gave rise to a serious 
religious ceremony. At certain set intervals all 
the fires within the limits of a tribe or nation were 
extinguished, and a period of gloom, despondency, 
and dread of the malignant powers succeeded. 
Then the ‘new fire”’ was kindled on the temple 
altar, and the flame was conveyed by swift mes- 
sengers from hearth to hearth throughout the land. 
This done, the period of gloom was followed by 
one of general joy and festivity. The malignant 
deities were banished ; the gods of light and warmth 


THE CONFLICT WITH NATURE 185 


were dominant again; happiness and security had 
returned to man. 

The beginning of the use of clothing, of artifi- 
cial shelter, and of fire formed one of the most 
vital periods in the history of human evolution. 
Coincident with them was the production of a 
much greater variety of implements than had been 
previously possessed, and many of these much 
superior to the older and ruder forms. The strug- 
gle with the glacial cold had roused man’s mind 
out of its old sluggishness, and brought it actively 
into operation in devising means of counteracting 
the perils of his situation and fitting him to the 
new conditions of existence. 

Among the important steps of progress was very 
likely a considerable advance in the use of lan- 
guage, enabling the men of that period more 
readily to consult with and advise one another, to 
give adequate warning of danger, to aid in the chase 
or in industrial pursuits, to educate the young and 
impart new ideas or teach new discoveries to the 
old. The mental powers of the best-trained indi- 
viduals then as now served the whole community, 
and nothing of value that was once gained was 
likely to be lost. Discovery and invention at that 
early period probably went on with interminable 
slowness as compared with the progress in later 
ages, yet even then new ideas, one by one, came 
into men’s minds, and step by step the methods of 
life were improved. 


186 MAN AND HIS ANCESTOR 


One important effect of the glacial chill needs 
to be adverted to. The severity of the weather was 
not the only thing to be provided against. The 
discovery of fire and the invention of clothing and 
habitation were not enough to insure man’s pres- 
ervation. For the severe cold must have greatly 
changed the conditions of the food supply, and the 
man of the period found it a difficult matter to 
obtain the first necessaries of life. The easy-going 
man of the earlier age, living amid an abundance 
of fruits and vegetables and surrounded by num- 
bers of game animals, or dwelling beside streams 
which were filled with easily taken fish, probably 
found the question of subsistence one of minor 
importance. The coming on of the Glacial Age 
made this question one of major importance. The 
supply of fruits and vegetable substances was 
greatly decreased by the biting chill, and the 
number of food animals was correspondingly 
reduced; while through much of the year the 
effects of frost drove the fish from the streams, 
and cut off effectually this source of food. Man 
was brought into a situation in which only the most 
active exertion of his powers of thought could pre- 
serve him from annihilation. 

He now found the exercise of the art of hunting 
more difficult than ever before, one that needed 
a new development of courage, cunning, alertness, 
and endurance, the scarcity of animals obliging 
him to make long journeys and attack the strong- 


TMEMOGONELLC Tia 2 iit INVALORE Wes 


est creatures. Whether or not he possessed the 
poisoned arrow, which the Pygmies now find so 
effective, cannot be said, but in all probability he 
was forced to invent new and more destructive 
weapons, a necessity that gave fresh exercise to 
his powers of invention. So far as our actual 
knowledge goes, the art of chipping stones into 
weapons and implements was not possessed before 
this period, and it may have been a result of the 
severe exigencies of the situation and the mental 
stimulation thence resulting. This art is not pos- 
sessed by any of the Pygmies, the nearest approach 
to it being the splitting of stone by fire and using 
the splinters as weapons. Very likely preglacial 
man was similarly destitute of this art. 

Under the severe strain of the glacial conditions 
the weak and incapable doubtless succumbed to 
the cold and deficiency of food; the strong and 
capable survived, gained superior powers, devised 
new weapons and implements, and became adapted 
to a new and decidedly adverse situation. From 
long depending, in considerable measure, on his 
physical powers, man came to trust more fully than 
before in his mental faculties, the result being a 
much greater variation in the size and activity of 
his brain than in other portions of his physical struc- 
ture. While it had become more difficult to find 
and capture food animals, he was at the same time 
in greater danger from carnivorous beasts, which 
were forced by partial starvation to overcome their 


188 MAN AND HIS ANCESTOR 


dread of man. He was thus obliged to become 
as alert and ready in defence as he was in attack, 
to associate himself more fully with his fellows in 
his hunting excursions and his other labors, and 
to adapt the forms and forces of nature still more 
to his needs, his.career as a tool-making animal 
being greatly stimulated by the necessities of his 
situation. 

It is conceivable that the art of agriculture may 
have been one of the outcomes of the situation in 
which man now found himself. The decrease in 
the food supply must have put all his powers of 
invention to the test, and the probable diminution 
in number and productiveness of food plants may 
have served as an instigation to the cultivation of 
useful plants, and the preservation of their prod- 
ucts, where possible, for winter supply. It is not 
unlikely that in this way and under this stimulation 
agriculture began, and that it made its way subse- 
quently from this locality to more southern regions. 
In this, however, we cannot go beyond conjecture. 

It seems useless to pursue this topic further, since 
the absence of facts forces us to confine ourselves 
largely to suggestions and probabilities. We have 
arrived at two definite hypotheses: first, that the 
original stage of man’s progress upward from the 
apes was completed when he gained dominion over 
the animal kingdom and attained the condition of 
the forest pygmies; second, that an advanced 
stage was reached when he achieved the conquest 


THE CONFLICT WITH NATURE 189 


of nature, so far as overcoming the exceedingly ad- 
verse conditions of the Glacial Age was concerned. 
At the close of this period of frigid cold man 
emerged as a higher being than the forest nomad 
or the agricultural people of the tropics, possessed 
of much superior arts and implements and with 
largely enhanced mental powers. The long and 
bitter struggle for existence through which he had 
passed had lifted him to a much higher level in 
the upward progress of life. 

He was a savage still, and at the close of the 
struggle he settled down into a second stage of 
stagnation. The conflict was at an end, he was 
the victor in the fight, he could rest upon his lau- 
rels and take life easy. In addition to his me- 
chanical gains, man had advanced much in social 
and political relations, and continued to advance 
until his primitive form of organization was per- 
fected. At the end of it all we find him existing 
under two conditions, depending upon differences 
in the character of the country in which he lived. 

In the steppes and deserts of Asia and the des- 
erts of Africa he was a nomad herdsman, his life 
being spent in the care of his flocks and herds, his 
political organization the patriarchal, his posses- 
sions few, his needs small, his mind at rest, his 
progress largely at an end. Thus he still lives, 
and this organization and mode of life still persist, 
little affected by the long centuries that have passed 
and not greatly modified by the many wars in which 


190 MAN AND HIS ANCESTOR 


he has been engaged. Mentally, the man of the 
steppe and the desert is to-day little advanced be- 
yond his predecessors of thousands of years ago. 

In the more fertile regions of the earth man 
had become an agriculturist, each clan holding its 
section of the earth as common property. A 
different though primitive form of political organ- 
ization arose here, that of the village community, 
in which there was no distinction of rich and 
poor, all men were equal in rights and privileges, 
all were content with their situation, and the men- 
tal condition was largely that of stagnation. This 
political condition we find to have been wide- 
spread over the earth, alike in the eastern and 
western hemispheres, as the one into which all 
developing agricultural communities emerged, and 
in which they persisted unchanged until forced to 
adopt new relations through a new influence 
still to be described. As the patriarchal clan is 
persistent on the Asiatic steppes and deserts, so 
is the village community on the Russian plains 
and among the Aryans of Hindostan. It has been 
generally overcome in other localities, but it was 
broadly extended until within comparatively recent 
times, and traces of it may still be found in many 
parts of the earth. 

The political organization of these primitive 
communities of herders and farmers was of the 
simplest. Over the herding clan a patriarchal 
chief presided, his authority based on his position 


THE CONFLICT WITH NATURE IOI 


as representative of the ancestor of the commu- 
nity. The head man of the agricultural clan was 
elected by the free choice of his fellows, his equals 
in rank and station. But the supposed most direct 
descendant from the clan ancestor was apt to be 
chosen. In both cases the political organization 
was of the family type, being but an extension 
of family government, and the widely prevailing 
system of ancestor worship had much to do with 
the reverence in which the chief was held and the 
authority which he exercised. 

The development of this phase of human prog- 
ress did not stop here. Kingdoms and empires 
arose as direct resultants of this condition of 
affairs. In some localities, such as Egypt and 
Babylonia, the great fertility of the soil in the 
time gave rise to a dense population, largely gath- 
ered in towns and villages, where industries other 
than agriculture developed and closer social rela- 
tions existed. The simple organization of the 
village or the clan was not sufficient for such a 
population, and a more intricate governmental 
system arose; but it seems to have been simply an 
extension of the older system of chieftainship, 
based on the family or paternal relation, and on 
the growth of religious influence and priestly 
control. It seems, in fact, to have been through 
the influence of religious ideas that men first rose 
to power and became supreme over their fellows. 

We have no concern here with the development 


192 MAN AND HIS ANCESTOR 


of religious systems, other than to say that in the 
primitive agricultural community a succession of 
ideas of man’s relation to the unseen arose, yield- 
ing, in addition to the widespread ancestor wor- 
ship, a system of shamanism, or belief in the 
presence and power of malignant spirits, and one 
of fetichism, which developed into mythology, or 
worship of the great powers of nature. What 
we are concerned in is the fact that from these 
religious conceptions a priesthood everywhere arose, 
beginning in the simple conjurer or the healer by 
spells and incantations, and developing into a 
priestly establishment whose leading members had 
a vigorous control over the people through their 
beliefs, fears, and superstitions. 

This priestly system was the basis of the first 
imperial organization. Kingly authority was not 
gained at first through power over men’s bodies, 
but through influence over their minds. There 
is much reason to ‘believe that the chiefot@the 
clan or tribe, who led in its public worship and 
was looked upon as the representative of its divine 
ancestor, retained the influence thence arising as 
the tribe developed into the nation, adding the 
power and position of the high priest to that of the 
tribal chief. 

There is abundant evidence that in this simple 
and direct manner the imperial organization every- 
where grew out of the primitive village and patri- 
archal systems. In the early days of Egypt, before 


THE CONFLICT WITH NATURE 193 


its era of conquest began, the Pharaoh was the 
high priest of the nation, weak in temporal, strong 
in spiritual power; and the political organization 
in general probably grew out of the sacerdotal 
establishment. Very likely the Babylonian king- 
dom was organized in the same manner, though 
wars and changes of dynasty have obscured its 
early state. In China the patriarch of a nomad 
horde became emperor of a nation retaining an- 
‘cestor worship as its chief religious system. He 
held, and still holds, the position of father of his 
people, the representative of the original ancestor, 
and high priest of the nation. 

In India the priestly establishment was differ- 
ently organized. It was a democracy instead of 
an aristocracy. There was no high priest to seize 
the reins of government. Asa result, no empire 
arose in India. A simple outgrowth of the tribal 
system developed, each tribe under its chief, while 
the priesthood as a whole remained the real rulers 
of the people. 

If we come to America, we discover a similar 
condition of affairs, the head of the religious estab- 
lishment becoming everywhere the head of the 
nation. This was the case in Mexico, where the 
Montezuma was high priest, and derived his power 
largely from this position. It was the case in 
Peru, where the Inca was the direct representative 
on earth of the solar deity. It was the case with 
the agricultural communities of the southern United 

Oo 


194 MAN AND HIS ANCESTOR 


States, whose Mico was at once high priest and 
autocrat. It was doubtless the case with the 
Mound Builders, of whom these communities were 
probably the descendants. 

Such seems to have been the final outcome of the 
contest with nature, where permitted to develop 
in its natural and unobstructed way. A series of 
empires of a simple type of organization arose, 
their rulers uniting temporal and spiritual power, 
and becoming autocrats in a double sense, supreme 
lords of body and soul. It was in its nature a per- 
sistent type. Once reached, it tended to continue 
indefinitely, stagnation following the era of growth. 
But war and invasion have broken it up every- 
where except in China, a country largely defended 
by nature against invasion and inhabited by an 
innately peaceful people. As the forest Pygmy 
group represents to-day the completion of the first 
stage of human evolution, so the patriarchal empire 
of China represents that of the second. Stagna- 
tion there long since succeeded development. For 
several thousand years China has almost stood still. 
It comes down to us as the fossilized representative 
of an antique system, physically active but mentally 
inert, its organization rigidly fixed, and not to be 
disturbed unless the empire itself is rent to pieces. 


XI 


WARFARE AND CIVILIZATION 


Lone before the second phase of the evolution 
of man had been completed the third phase had 
begun, that of the conflict of man with man. The 
animal kingdom once subdued, and nature made 
man’s friend and servant, the human race increased 
and multiplied until the borders of communities 
met and hostile relations arose between them. A 
fight for place began, a struggle for dominion, a 
fierce and incessant contest for supremacy, and for 
ages men locked arms in a terrible and merciless 
strife, in which the weak and incompetent steadily 
went to the wall, the strong, daring, and aggressive 
rose to power and control. 

It was the final act in the great drama of ‘“ natu- 
ral selection,” which had been played upon the stage 
of the earth since the first appearance of living 
forms; the last and most ruthless of them all, for 
the instigating cause was no longer merely the 
pressure for a share of the food supply, but to 
this was added the lust for power and place, the 
hunger for wealth and dominion, the insatiable ap- 
petite for autocratic control. Millions upon mill- 
ions of men were swept away by the sword, and 

195 


196 MAN AND HIS ANCESTOR 


by its attendant demons, famine and pestilence; 
and still the stronger and abler climbed to the top, 
the weaker and inferior succumbed; and the intel- 
lectual evolution of man went on with enhanced 
rapidity as the harvest of the sword was gathered 
in, and the merciless reapers of men swept in suc- 
cessive columns over the earth, each a stage higher 
in mental ability than the preceding. 

This phase of human evolution is that of the era 
of human history. Before its advent man had no 
history. It would be as useful to attempt to give 
the history of the gorilla as of man in the early 
stages of his progress. History is the record of 
individuality, and in primitive times equality and 
communism prevailed, and the individual had not 
yet separated himself from the mass. Man had 
settled into the dull inertness of a stagnant pool, 
and the fierce winds of war were needed to break 
up his mental slothfulness and stir thought into 
healthful activity. There must be leaders before 
there can be history; the annals of mankind begin 
in hero worship; the relations of superior and in- 
ferior need to be established ; and individual action 
and supremacy are the foundations upon which 
all history is built. Only by stirring up the deep 
pool of human life into seething turmoil and 
unrest could the tendency to stagnation be over- 
come, the best and most aspiring rising to the top, 
the dull and heavy sinking to the bottom, and the 
element of thought permeating the whole with its 
vitalizing spirit. 


WARFARE AND CIVILIZATION 197 


When this phase of evolution is reached, we 
cease for the first time to deal with species and 
genera in the mass and begin to deal with indi- 
viduals, who now emerge from the general group 
and stand above and apart like great signal posts 
on the highway of progress. These heroes are not 
alone those of the sword. ‘They are the leaders in 
art, in literature, in science, in thought, in every 
domain; the men who stand above, supreme and 
shining, and toward whose elevation the whole 
mass below surges slowly but strenuously upward. 
The third phase of human evolution, therefore, is 
that of the emergence of the individual as the 
leader, lawgiver, teacher of mankind, each leader 
forming a goal for the emulation of all below. 
And this condition is the legitimate outcome of 
war, which, terrible as it always has been, was the 
only agency that could rapidly break up the stag- 
nancy of early communism and send man upward 
in a swirl toward the heights of civilization. 

To give the history of this phase of evolution 
would be to give the history of mankind, and 
would be aside from the purpose of this work. 
All that need be attempted, in support of our 
argument, is to present some general deductions 
from human history, indicating the leading features 
of the service man has received from war. 

Conflict between man and man was at first 
vague and inconsequential. It was only after 
settled and organized communities, based origi- 


198 MAN AND HIS ANCESTOR 


nally on the family relation, and held together by 
the possession of property in common, had been 
formed, that war became more effective in its 
results. The chief of these results, in the early 
days, were two: the breaking up of the old 
equality of power and possession, and the develop- 
ment of larger and more powerful communities. 
The head man of the village community, or the 
herding clan, possessed some delegated authority 
but no political supremacy over his fellows. 
Equality existed alike in theory and in fact. 
Battle between neighboring clans was the first 
step toward breaking this up. The conquered clan 
became subordinated to the victorious one, and the 
chief of the victors, as the representative of his clan, 
exercised an authority over the subject community 
which he did not possess at home. The degree of 
subordination differed from the mild form of tribute- 
paying to that of personal slavery. But in either 
case we see the old condition of equality vanishing, 
and that of class distinctions and the relation of 
superior and inferior arising, while the power of 
the chief advances from a delegated authority to 
an established supremacy. 

The second outcome of this early phase of war 
was an increase in the size of political groups. 
The conquered were forced to aid the conquerors 
in war as in peace; clans combined to resist ag- 
gression; minor communities grew into organized 
tribes; tribes developed into nations as a result of 


WARFARE AND CIVILIZATION 199 


warlike operations. This growth in political or- 
ganization was a necessary and inevitable result 
of continued warfare. The aggressors gathered 
all the strength possible. The assailed peoples did 
the same. Temporary alliances grew into perma- 
nent ones. Larger armies were formed, larger 
communities were organized, national development 
advanced at a rate tenfold, probably a hundred- 
fold, more rapidly than it would have done had 
peaceful conditions persisted. 

Side by side with tribal and national consolidation 
went on the growth in leadership. The head man 
became a war chief, the war chief a king. Suc- 
cess made him a hero to his people. He grew to 
be the lord of conquered tribes; into his hands 
fell the bulk of the spoils; the relation of equality 
of possessions vanished as the plunder taken by 
the army was distributed unequally among the 
victors. Below the principal leader came his 
ablest followers, each claiming and receiving a 
proportionate share in the new division of power 
and wealth. In short, when the era of war had 
become fully inaugurated, the old social and politi- 
cal relations of mankind were broken up with 
great rapidity; equality of power was replaced by 
inequality, which steadily grew more and more 
declared; equality of wealth in like manner van- 
ished; in all directions the individual emerged 
from the mass, class distinctions became intricate, 
and the relations of rich and poor, of king, noble, 


200 MAN AND HIS ANCESTOR 


citizen, and slave, completely replaced the old 
communal organization of mankind. 

War was the great agent in this evolution. It 
might have emerged slowly in peace; it came with 
almost startling rapidity in war, and reached a de- 
gree of power on the one hand and subordination 
on the other that could scarcely ever have appeared 
had conditions of peace prevailed. With this growth 
of great nations came a rapid development in polit- 
ical science, in legal institutions, in social relations. 
An enormous advance was made, in a limited period, 
in the civilization of mankind; asa result, not of 
the devastation and slaughter of war, but of its in- 
fluence upon human organization. 

It was the principle of reward for ability to 
which the leaders of men owed their supremacy. 
When nations were organized this same principle 
took another and very useful form. The distri- 
bution of wealth had become strikingly unequal. 
There were endless grades of distinction between 
the supremely wealthy and the absolutely poor. 
The wealthy were ready to lavish their money in 
return for articles of pleasure and luxury. The 
poor, in their thirst for a share of wealth, were 
strongly stimulated to inventive activity in produc- 
ing new and desirable wares. Inequality became 
the mainspring of business activity ; thought and in- 
ventive ingenuity were strongly exercised; a rapid 
progress went on in the production of new devices, 
new methods, and new articles of necessity and lux- 


WARFARE AND CIVILIZATION 201 


ury; manufacture flourished, commerce increased, 
civilization appeared, the whole as a legitimate out- 
come of the conditions brought about by war. 

This phase of human evolution, as may be seen, 
was radically different from that already considered, 
arising from the development of sacerdotal influ- 
ence and priestly power. They worked together, 
no doubt. The establishment of the great primi- 
tive empires, as a peaceful process, was greatly 
complicated by war, which tended steadily to in- 
crease the temporal power of the ruler and enable 
him in time to control by the sword alone. But it 
is interesting to find that long after the old system 
was practically overthrown its shadow still lay upon 
the nations. The powerful war monarchs of As- 
syria led their armies to conquest in the name of 
the national deity, whose vicegerents they claimed 
to be. The autocratic emperors of Rome went so 
far as to claim in some cases to be gods them- 
selves. Even in modern Russia some of this dig- 
nity pertains to the emperor, as the supreme head 
of the national church. Old ideas are proverbially 
hard to kill. 

But the mission of the priesthood by no means 
stopped here. The priests rose to influence as the 
teachers as well as the leaders of the people. The 
members of this class, set aside from manual occu- 
pations, and devoted to thought upon the relations 
of man to the divine, played an important part in 
the development of the human mind. As a result 


202 MAN AND HIS ANCESTOR 


of their speculative activity of thought the old 
religious systems sank into the background; the 
simple worship of primitive times was _ over- 
shadowed by intricate mythological systems, 
splendid in worship and creed; cosmogonies and 
philosophies were devised; and human thought, 
once fairly set loose in this field, went on with 
great energy and imaginative fervor. 

Literature arose as a result of this activity of 
thought. It took at first the form of hymns, 
speculative essays, magical formulas, dogmas, 
ordinances of worship, etc. By degrees it grew 
more secular in form, until in the end secular 
literature arose. This was greatly stimulated by 
the conditions of inequality arising from war. In 
the same manner as the reward for merit in 
invention stimulated men to activity in the me- 
chanical arts, so the hope of reward for literary 
production stirred up men to the composing of 
poems, histories, and other works of thought. In 
both directions, physical and mental, men were 
stimulated to the most active exertions by the con- 
ditions of inequality in wealth and power, and the 
consequent desire to obtain a share of the money 
lavished by the rich and the authority similarly 
lavished by the powerful. 

The broad general view here taken must suffice 
for our consideration of this phase of human evolu- 
tion. It brings the story of the development of 
man closely up to the present stage of political 


WARFARE AND CIVILIZATION 203 


and social organizations and relations. It may be 
said, in conclusion of this section of our work, 
that the powerful agency of war, so active and 
important in the past, has in reat part lost its 
utility in the present, and bids fair to be brought 
to an end before the world is much older. It is 
no longer needed, nearly or quite all that it is 
capable of doing for mankind being accomplished, 
while the equally powerful agencies of commerce, 
travel, leagues of nations, and other conditions of 
modern origin have taken its place. 

War, while yielding many useful results, has 
given rise to others whose utility is questionable, 
and whose ill-effects it will take much time and 
effort to set aside. The inequality of power to 
which war gave rise continues in many parts of the 
world, and the inequality of wealth shows signs 
of increase instead of diminution. Once useful, 
they have developed to an injurious extent. The 
result 1s a state of unrest, discontent, and more or 
less active opposition, which constitutes a condition 
of permanent conflict, a deep dissatisfaction with 
existing institutions abnormal to a justly organized 
society. War has become in great measure useless ; 
but the scaffolding ftom which it built up the edifice 
of civilization remains, and stands as a tottering 
ruin threatening to engulf mankind in its fall. 

Ever since the triumph of autocracy in the 
Roman empire, the masses of mankind have 
steadily protested against an inequality that is 


204 MAN AND HIS ANCESTOR 


alien to the natural rights of man. For century 
after century the struggle against undue exercise 
of power has gone on, and the hereditary lords of 
mankind have lost, stage by stage, their usurped 
power, until in the modern republic they have been 
replaced by the servants and chosen agents of the 
people. But the autocracy of wealth still holds its 
own, and is growing more and more formidable, 
and against this the wave of opposition is now ris- 
ing. Everywhere man is earnestly and sternly 
demanding an equitable distribution of the produc- 
tions of nature and art. What the outcome of this 
demand will be it is impossible to say. It must 
inevitably lead to some readjustment of the wealth 
of mankind; but only the slow process of social 
evolution can decide what this shall be. 

We have endeavored in this brief treatise to 
trace the development of man from his primeval 
state as a tree-dwelling animal in the depths of 
the tropic woods, through the phases of his later 
condition as an erect surface dweller, his conflict 
with and dominion over the animal kingdom, his 
subsequent contest with the adverse powers of 
nature, and his final warfare with his fellows and 
emergence into civilization. Each of these con- 
tests has left its results; the first in the forest 
nomads of the eastern tropics, the second in the 
patriarchal herding tribes of the steppes and 
deserts, the village communities of Russia and 
the paternal empire of China, the third in the 
enlightened nations of Europe and America. 


WARFARE AND CIVILIZATION 205 


For how long a period this mighty drama of 
evolution has continued it is impossible to say. 
Its first phase must have been of interminable 
slowness; its second, while more rapid, still very 
deliberate; its third of much greater rapidity, yet 
extending over several thousands of years. Mill- 
ions of years have probably passed away since it 
began, yet the period involved is none too long for 
the magnitude of the results, whose greatness can 
be seen if we contrast man’s mental development 
with that of the lower animals during this period. 
Physically, the development of man has been incon- 
siderable — much less apparently than that of many 
other animals. Mentally, it has been enormous. 
The whole of nature’s influences, in new and often 
adverse situations, have been brought to bear upon 
man’s mind, and as the result we have civilized man 
as contrasted with the anthropoid ape. And the 
end is not yet. The era of war in man’s develop- 
Mientsisenearvits close,,.and’ a new eta ol “peace, 
under conditions of advanced mental and physical 
activity, seems about to begin. Its outcome no 
man can predict, but it may far surpass in bene- 
ficial results all that has gone before, and carry 
man upward to an extraordinarily elevated mental 
plane. 


XII 
THE EVOLUTION OF MORALITY 


THE evolution of man from his animal ancestry 
has been a composite phenomenon, one by no 
means confined to the physical and intellectual 
conditions which we have so far considered, but 
embracing also features of moral and spiritual 
progress. The origin and growth of these need 
also to be reviewed, if we would present a fully 
rounded sketch of human evolution. So far as 
his physical form is concerned, man became prac- 
tically completed ages ago, as the supreme effort 
of nature in the moulding and vitalizing of matter. 
When the arena of the struggle for existence 
became transferred from the body to the mind, 
variation in the body, once so active, rapidly de- 
clined; and with the full employment of the intel- 
lect in the conflict with nature, physical evolution 
ceased, except in minor particulars, and the organic 
structure of man became practically fixed. The 
human animal, therefore, as a physical species, 
has reached a stage of permanence. And this 
may be regarded as the supreme result of material 
evolution in animals; or at least it may be affirmed 


that, while man continues to exist, no member of 
206 


THE EVOLUTION OF MORALITY 207 


the lower animal tribes can possibly develop to 
become his rival. 

But though man is not markedly distinct as a 
physical species from his anthropoid ancestor, the 
process of evolution has not ceased, but has gone 
on in him rapidly and immensely. The strain has 
simply been transferred from the body to the mind, 
and to the extent that the mental characteristics 
are more flexible and yield more readily to forma- 
tive influences, the mind has surpassed the body 
in rapidity of evolutionary variation. Within a 
period during which the lower animals have re- 
mained almost unchanged, man has varied enor- 
mously in mental conditions, and to-day may be 
looked upon, not merely as a distinct species, but 
practically as a new order, or class, of animals, as 
far removed intellectually from the mammals below 
him as they are from the insects or mollusks. 

If now we turn from the physical and _ intel- 
lectual to the ethical stage of development, it will 
be to perceive as marked and decided a process of 
evolution. The change has, perhaps, been even 
greater, since in the lower animals the moral fac- 
ulties are more rudimentary than the intellectual. 
But, on the other hand, the moral development 
in man has been much inferior to the intellectual. 
Therefore, though the foundation was lower, the 
edifice has not reached nearly so great a height, 
and man to-day stands in moral elevation consider- 
ably below his intellectual level. 


208 MAN AND HIS ANCESTOR 


It was formerly the custom to look upon man as 
the only intellectual and moral animal, the forms 
below him being credited solely with hereditary 
instincts. This belief is no longer entertained 
by those familiar with the results of modern 
research. Evidences of unquestionable powers 
of thought have*been traced in the lower animals, 
imagination and reason being alike indicated. 
The elephant, for instance, is evidently a think- 
ing animal, and is capable of overcoming difficul- 
ties and adapting itself to new situations, using 
methods not unlike those which man _ himself 
might display under similar circumstances. Its 
gratitude for favors and remembrance of and 
revenge for injuries are evidences of its possession 
of the moral attributes. The recorded instances 
of displays of reason in the dog, man’s constant 
companion, are innumerable. Intellectual attri- 
butes are still more pronounced in the ape tribe, 
as indicated in a preceding chapter, where it was 
argued that man began his development in intellect 
at a somewhat advanced stage. 

The same cannot be said in regard to his moral 
evolution. In this respect the level from which 
man emerged was a much lower one. If his 
moral growth may be symbolized as a great tree, 
it is one not very deeply rooted in the world below 
him. Yet it doubtless has grown out of the soil 
of animal life, and its finer tendrils and fibres may 
be traced to a considerable depth in this fertile soil. 


THESE VOLGTION-OF MORALITY. 209 


Before proceeding with this subject, it is impor- 
tant to devote some attention to the characteristics 
of the moral attributes, concerning which there is 
much diversity of opinion. There has been abun- 
dance of theorizing upon the principles of ethics, 
thinkers dividing themselves into two widely sepa- 
rated groups. In the one school, the intuitive, the 
principles of morality are looked upon as inherent 
in the soul of man, unfolding as the plant unfolds 
from its seed. In the other school, the inductive, 
morality is claimed to be founded upon selfishness, 
the moving principle of human actions being the 
desire to avoid pain and attain pleasure. Each 
school makes a strong argument, which goes far 
to indicate that each is based upon a truth, and 
therefore that neither has the whole truth. 

The fault would appear to lie in the attempt to 
make morality a unit. In our view this unity does 
not exist. While both schools may be partly right, 
neither would seem to be wholly right, and they 
appear to be pulling at the two ends of a single 
chain. Ethics, in short, may be regarded as com- 
posed of unlike halves, which unite centrally to form 
a whole. It may aid to reconcile the conflicting 
systems of theorists if it be held that the inductive 
half of ethics is the product of the reasoning 
powers and outer experience, the intuitive half 
the product of feeling and inner development ; 
while both meet and harmonize in life as reason 


and feeling harmonize in the mind. 
P 


210 MAN AND HIS ANCESTOR 


It is interesting to find that it is the intuitive, not 
the inductive, element of the moral attributes that 
we find principally developed in the lower animals. 
This is the outgrowth of instinct, not of thought; 
the development of that principle of attraction 
which manifests itself in all nature, and which, 
when associated with consciousness, becomes what 
we know as love, affection, or sympathy. It is a 
powerful and pervading force in all matter, in- 
telligent and unintelligent, and in conscious beings 
falls naturally among the emotions. Like all the 
passions, it is instinctive in origin, though it may 
come under the control of the intellect as the 
mind develops. In the lower animal world it is 
manifested as a vigorous attraction, the sexual. 
In the higher animals this attraction expands and 
grows complex. The attraction between the sexes 
becomes love, and in its full unfoldment may join 
two individuals together for life and influence most 
of their actions. To the attraction between the 
sexes should be added that between parents and 
children, the parental and filial, and that between 
associates, the tribal or social, the latter, though 
weaker, of the same character. 

With these bonds reason has nothing to do. It 
does not form them and would seek in vain to sever 
them. They belong to a part of the mental con- 
stitution which lies outside the kingdom of thought, 
and they, therefore, often act counter to the selfish 
consideration of personal safety. The love bond, 


THE EVOLUTION OF MORALITY Zit 


indeed, in its full strength, seems to constitute a 
partial loss of individuality. Mates will suffer pain 
and endure physical injury for each other or for 
their offspring to as great an extent as if these 
constituted a part of themselves, and as if their 
actions were performed in self-defence. 

With this brief review of the philosophy of the 
ethical sentiments, we may proceed to a consid- 
eration of the facts. While the rudimentary form 
of the sentiment in question is manifest far down 
in the descending grades of animal life, it expands 
into what we may fairly term love or affection only 
in the higher forms. Romanes, in his “ Animal 
Intelligence,” remarks: “As regards emotions, it 
is among birds that we first meet with a conspicu- 
ous advance in the tenderer feelings of affection 
and sympathy. Those relating to the sexes and 
the care of progeny are in this class proverbial for 
their intensity, offering, in fact, a favorite type for 
the poet and moralist. The pining of the ‘love- 
bird’ for its absent mate, and the keen distress of 
a hen on losing her chickens, furnish abundant 
evidence of vivid feelings of the kind in question. 
Even the stupid-looking ostrich has heart enough 
to die for love, as was the case with a male in the 
Rotund of the Jardin des Plantes, who, having 
lost his mate, pined rapidly away.” 

Among social and communal animals the senti- 
ment of sympathy widens to embrace all the mem- 
bers of the tribe, a characteristic which is very 


212 MAN AND HIS ANCESTOR 


strongly manifested in so low an organism as the 
ant. Asan example of this feeling among birds, 
Romanes quotes an interesting illustration from 
Edward, the naturalist. The latter had shot and 
wounded a tern, but before he could reach it, the 
helpless bird was carried off by its companions. 
Two of these took hold of it by the wings and flew 
with it several yards over the water. They then 
relinquished their burden to two others, and the 
process continued in this way until they at length 
reached a rock at some distance. When the 
hunter, eager for his prize, pursued them, the sym- 
pathetic birds again took up their wounded com- 
panion and flew off with it again over the water. 
Abundant instances of this sentiment of social 
affection could be quoted from the mammalia. It 
is by no means confined to members of a species, 
but may extend to very unlike species. No one 
needs to be told of the warm affection so often 
shown by the dog for its master, a love which 
will lead it to dare wounds or death in his service, 
or in the protection of his property. This altruis- 
tic sentiment strongly exists in the monkeys. Ex- 
amples of the ardent feeling of these animals for 
their fellows have been given in a preceding chap- 
ter, and many more might be quoted, if necessary. 
It must suffice here to quote a single further in- 
stance cited by Romanes, and relating to a small 
monkey which was taken ill on shipboard, where 
there were several others of different species. 


THE EVOLUTION OF MORALITY 213 


“It had always been a favorite with the other 
monkeys, who seemed to regard it as the last born 
and the pet of the family; and they granted it 
many indulgences which they seldom conceded to 
one another. It was very tractable and gentle in 
its temper, and never took advantage of the par- 
tiality shown to it. From the moment it was taken 
ill, their attention and care of it redoubled; and it 
was truly affecting and interesting to see with what 
anxiety and tenderness they tended and nursed the 
little creature. A struggle often ensued between 
them for priority in these offices of affection; and 
some would steal one thing and some another, 
which they would carry to it untasted, however 
tempting it might be to their own palates. They 
would take it up gently in their forepaws, hug it 
to their breasts, and cry over it as a fond mother 
would over her suffering child.” 

With the human race the love sentiment does 
not usually display the singleness of energy shown 
among the lower animals. It is affected and often 
checked in its development by an intricate series of 
influences, which act on savage and civilized man 
alike. The family formed the primitive human 
group, its linking elements being the sexual attrac- 
tion between man and woman and the fervent affec- 
tion between parents and children. These feelings, 
while strong in certain directions, were crude and 
uneven. In savage tribes to-day the wife is an ill- 
treated drudge. Yet the husband will protect his 


214 MAN AND HIS ANCESTOR 


wife and children from danger at risk of his life. 
The maternal instinct seems still stronger. The 
mother often acts as if the child were an actual 
part of herself. Danger or injury to it produces 
in her a mental agony, the close equivalent of its 
fear or pain, and she will endure suffering and peril 
in its protection with an impulse beyond the control 
of reason. 

This sentiment, in a weakened form, extended 
from the family to the group; and the success 
of man in gaining the mastery over the other 
animals was doubtless greatly aided by the strong 
bond of social affinity existing between the mem- 
bers of a group. They worked together in a 
fuller sense than any other animals except the 
ants and bees. 

From the original social group another and 
closer community seems gradually to have de- 
veloped, the group of kindred. This was a natural 
outgrowth from the family, whose bond of affection 
was extended to include more distant relatives, 
until there emerged the organized group of kin- 
dred known as the ‘Village Community,” which 
seems everywhere to have preceded civilization. 
This bond of kindred gradually extended, combin- 
ing men into larger and larger groups, until the 
clan, the horde, and the tribe emerged, their mem- 
bers all linked together by the reality or the fiction 
of common descent. Such was the form of organi- 
zation that existed in Greece and Rome in their 


THE EVOLUTION OF MORALITY 215 


early days, and made its influence felt far down 
into their later history. It existed indeed, at some 
period, over almost all the earth. 

As the group widened, the bond of sympathy 
weakened. Love in the family found its counter- 
part in fellow-feeling in the tribe, in patriotism 
in the nation. It is undoubtedly true that desire 
for personal protection is one of the strong in- 
fluences which bind men into societies. The 
hope of advantage in other directions and the 
pleasure of social intercourse are other combin- 
ing forces. Yet below these rational elements 
kas always abided the emotional element, the 
sympathetic attraction which binds kindred closely 
together, and which exerts some degree of influ- 
ence on all members of the same group or nation. 

The development of the ethical principle in man- 
kind is largely due to the extension of the senti- 
ment of socialsympathy. For ages it was confined 
to the immediate group. Such was the case even 
in civilized Greece, intellectually one of the most 
advanced of peoples, but morally very contracted. 
The Greeks were long divided into minor groups, 
with the warmest sentiment of patriotism uniting 
the members of each community, while their com- 
mon origin bound all the Hellenes together. But 
this feeling failed to cross the borders of the nar- 
row peninsula of Greece, all peoples beyond these 
borders being viewed as barbarians, in whose pleas- 
ures and pains no interest was felt, and whose mis- 


216 MAN AND HIS ANCESTOR 


fortunes produced no stir of sympathy in the Gre- 
cian heart. Even Aristotle taught that Greeks 
owed no more duties to barbarians than to wild 
beasts, and a philosopher who declared that his 
affection extended to the whole people of Greece 
was thought to be remarkably sympathetic. 

The Romans were equally narrow in their early 
days, and not until the empire extended to the 
outer borders of the civilized world did this nar- 
rowness give way to a more expanded sympathy. 
The brotherhood of mankind, indeed, was taught 
by Socrates, Cicero, and others of the ancient 
moral philosophers, yet these seeds of philosophy 
fell in very sterile soil and took root with discourag- 
ing slowness. Philosophers elsewhere taught the 
dogma of universal love, — Confucius among the 
Chinese, Gautama among the Hindoos, — but their 
teachings have borne little fruit in the great, stag- 
nant peoples of Asia, in whom the narrowness of 
semicivilization prevails. 

The teachings of Christ, whose code of morality 
was the intuitive one, ‘ Love one another,” have 
been far more effective. Christianity became the 
religion of Europe, since then the most progressive 
part of the world, and with every step of progress 
in civilization the Christ doctrine of charity and 
sympathy reached a higher and broader stage. 
To-day it has attained, in Europe and America, a 
wide degree of development, and the vast exten- 
sion of human intercourse through the mediums of 


THESEVOLOTION OF MORALITY rd 


travel, commerce, and telegraphic communication 
is, for the first time in human history, beginning 
to lift the doctrine of the universal brotherhood of 
man from the plane of a philosophic dogma toward 
that of an established fact. The range of sympathy 
is narrow yet, selfishness predominates, the truly 
altruistic are the few, the feebly sympathetic and 
coldly selfish are the many; yet it must be ad- 
mitted that there has been a great development of 
altruism during the nineteenth century, and the 
promise of the coming of Christ’s kingdom on the 
earth is greater to-day than at any former period 
in the history of mankind. 

The love principle is the innate moral element 
of the universe. Its rudimentary form is the at- 
traction between atoms, which expands into the 
attraction between spheres. We see a develop- 
ment of it in the magnetic and electric attractions, 
and a higher one in the sexual attraction that exists 
in the lowest organisms. Its expansion continues 
until it reaches the high level of human love and 
social sympathy. But throughout its whole de- 
velopment consciousness takes no part in its ori- 
gin. While conscious of its existence, we do not 
consciously call it into existence. Men and women 
“fall in love”; they do not reason themselves into 
affection. Those we love become in a measure a 
part of ourselves, we feel their sufferings and en- 
dure their afflictions, not through the nerves of the 
body, but through the finer ones of the mind, — 


218 MAN AND HIS ANCESTOR 


a plexus of spiritual nerves which stretch unseen 
from soul to soul. So strong is this sympathetic 
affinity that Comte was induced to look upon man- 
kind as an organism, and it gave rise in the mind 
of Leslie Stephens to the conception of a common 
“social tissue.” 

Love and law rule the universe. It is this sec- 
ond moral element, that of law, which we have 
next to consider. Inductive morality had its origin 
in experience ; it assumed the form of social restric- 
tion, then of fixed law and precept, and culminated 
in the sense of duty —a conscientious avoidance 
of that which was thought to be wrong, and an 
earnest desire to do what was looked upon as right. 

The history of this phase of morality differs 
essentially from that of the phase we have just 
considered. The sense of duty, the conscientious 
sentiment, so highly developed in man, seems 
largely non-existent in the lower animals, so far as 
observation has taught us. Yet it is not quite 
wanting, its rudiment is there, and this rudiment 
is capable of development. It may be, indeed, 
that a highly developed sense of duty exists in the 
ants and bees, to judge from their diligent labors 
for the benefit of the community. But the clear- 
est examples of conscientious performance of duty 
are those seen in the case of the dog, in which 
animal intimate association with man has devel- 
oped something strongly approaching a _ con- 
science. A dog needs only to be well treated to 


THE EVOLUTION OF MORALITY 219 


display a sense of dignity and a self-respect analo- 
gous to these feelings in man. A sensitive resent- 
ment against injustice in high-caste and carefully 
nurtured dogs has often been observed; while 
shame for an act which the animal knows to be 
forbidden has been seen in a hundred instances. 
The sense of duty is occasionally very strongly 
developed. Many striking examples of this are 
on record. A dog will often defend his master’s 
property with the greatest devotion, letting no 
temptation draw him away from the path of duty. 

An instance has been related to the writer in 
which an extraordinary display of this feeling was 
made. A gentleman, on coming home at night, 
found he had forgotten his key, and attempted to 
enter the house by the window of a room in which 
his dog was on duty as a night-watch. To his sur- 
prise and annoyance the animal would not permit 
him to enter, and attacked him every time he tried 
toclimbin. The animal knew him well, responded 
to his attempts to fondle it, but the moment he 
made an attempt to enter the window it became 
hostile and seemed ready to spring upon him. In 
its small brain was the feeling that no one, master 
or stranger, had the right to enter that house at 
night by the window, and it was there to perform 
its duty without regard to persons. In the end, 
the gentleman was obliged to leave and seek 
shelter elsewhere. 

The development of the sense of duty and 


220 MAN AND HIS ANCESTOR 


the growth of moral restriction in primitive man 
were probably very slow, much more so than 
the evolution of intelligence. The social habit of 
man doubtless rendered necessary, at an early 
period, some restraints on the actions of individu- 
als, and these in time gained the strength of un- 
written law; but many of them were scarcely what 
we should call moral obligations. Many such re- 
strictions exist among savage tribes to-day, and to 
these we must turn for examples of their character. 
We, for instance, look upon theft and lying as 
immoral practices, but such is not the case with 
savages generally, most of whom will steal if the 
opportunity offers, while they will lie in so trans- 
parent and useless a manner as to indicate that 
they see nothing wrong in this practice. And 
yet the aborigines of India, many of whom are 
very immoral according to our standard, are 
often strongly averse to untruthfulness. “A true 
Gond,” says Mr. Grant, “ will commit a murder, 
but he will not tell a lie.’ It is well known that 
truthfulness was one of the chief virtues of the 
ancient Persians, a virtue that was accompanied 
by much which we would call immoral. The 
Hindoo devotee is exceedingly tender of the lives 
of animals, while he is often callous to human 
suffering. Disregard of human suffering, indeed, 
showed itself strongly through all the past ages, 
men being slaughtered with as little compunction 
as if they were so many wild beasts, while fright- 


THE EVOLUTION OF MORALITY 221 


ful tortures were inflicted with an extraordinary 
absence of humane feeling. And these excesses 
were committed by persons who in the ordinary 
affairs of life were frequently tender in feeling and 
conscientious in action. 

In truth, moral development from this point of 
view has always shown a one-sidedness that goes 
far to discredit the doctrine of intuitive concep- 
tions of right and wrong. The indications are 
strong that rules of conduct are not inherent in the 
human mind, that men become moral to the extent 
that they are taught the principles of justice, and 
grow one-sided in their ideas of virtue through 
incompleteness in their moral education. What 
we call sinfulness is largely a matter of custom 
and convention. Men cannot properly be said to 
sin when their actions are checked by no conscien- 
tious scruples, and what one people would consider 
atrocious instances of wrong-doing, might be 
looked upon as innocent and even estimable by 
a people with a different moral standard.  Reli- 
gion has much to do with this. The human sacri- 
fices and cannibal feasts of the Aztec Indians, for 
instance, were regarded by them as good deeds, 
obligations which they owed to their gods. Yet 
this people had attained to some of the refined 
practices and moral ideas of civilization. 

The leading principles of correct human conduct 
are few and simple. They were arrived at early in 
the history of human thought, and little has since 


222 MAN AND HIS ANCESTOR 


been added to them. They arose as results of 
human experience, as necessary principles of re- 
straint in developing communities, and were nearly 
all extant in prehistoric times as the unwritten laws 
of social organization. What creed-makers did was 
to put these ancient axioms of morality on record, 
and offer them to the world as codes of religious 
observance. They could not have been of primitive 
origin, since the most of them do not exist among 
the savage tribes still with us. There is nothing, 
indeed, to show that any idea of sinfulness exists 
in the minds of the lowest savages, the rules of 
conduct which they possess being such regulations 
as are necessary to the existence of the most un- 
developed community. 

Of the various codes of morals, much the best 
known to us is that given to the Israelites by 
Moses, the famous ‘Ten Commandments.” The 
most of these —as of all such codes — were evi- 
dently legal in origin, rules necessary for the exist- 
ence of a civilized society, restrictions controlling 
the conduct of men toward one another. It was the 
creed-makers who first gave such legal restrictions 
the strength of moral obligations, and announced 
that their infraction would be punished by divine 
agencies, even if they should escape human retri- 
bution. 

Many hurtful acts, indeed, came to be viewed as 
crimes alike against God and man, and punishable 
in the interests of both. Political and moral obli- 


THE EVOLUTION OF MORALITY 223 


gations thus shaded together; some of the evils of 
the world being punished by human agencies alone, 
some by divine, some by both. It must be said, 
however, that throughout the whole progress of 
human civilization the influence of moral obliga- 
tions has been rising, while the necessity for 
political laws has declined in like proportion. In 
ancient times the penalties for crimes against the 
community were terribly severe, while religion 
threatened those who offended the divine powers 
with frightful future punishments. The necessity 
for such severe restrictions has long been decreas- 
ing, and the more vividly it is felt that immoral 
deeds or debased thoughts and purposes will be 
visited by a spiritual retribution, the less necessity 
is there for laws and penalties. Thus the limita- 
tion of human actions by government is growing 
less necessary than of old, in conformity with the 
growing sense of spiritual degradation in evil and 
of spiritual elevation in good deeds. Mild laws 
have succeeded the severe edicts of the past, and 
with a considerable section of the community re- 
strictive laws have become useless, conscience 
taking the place of law. In such men the im- 
pulse to evil deeds dies unfulfilled, and the penalty 
for wrong-doing within themselves may be more 
severe than that which the community would in- 
flict. In the souls of such men sits a spiritual 
tribunal by which evil thoughts are tried and 
punished before they can develop into evil acts. 


224 MAN AND HIS ANCESTOR 


This consideration of the development of the 
moral principles and dogmas has been necessarily 
brief. In what direction it is leading must be evi- 
dent to all, and we can with assurance look forward 
to a condition of human society in which conscience 
will have become a stronger element of the intel- 
lect than now, the.sense of moral obligation a more 
prevailing sentiment, and legal restriction a less 
necessary governmental requirement. 

Of all the isms of the day altruism is far the 
noblest and most promising. In this opponent of 
selfism, this regard for the rights and happiness 
of others equally with our own, we find the link 
which binds together the two halves of the moral 
principle. The love sentiment on the one hand, 
the sense of duty on the other, meet and combine 
in the zeal of altruism, for which a truly developed 
conscience is merely another term. Those who 
have the good of others strongly at heart, who are 
truly Christian in a practical realization of the 
brotherhood of mankind, can safely be set free 
from all the reins of law, and trusted to do the 
right thing from innate feeling instead of outside 
compulsion. And, trusting in the future full de- 
velopment of the altruistic sentiment, we can hope- 
fully look forward to a time in which the moral law 
will exist alone, conscience become the controlling 
force in human actions, and government let fall 
the whip which it has so long held in threat over 
the shrinking back of man. 


XIII 
MAN'S RELATION TO THE SPIRITUAL 


THE purpose of this work has been to trace the 
evolutionary origin of man, in his ascent from the 
lower animal world to his full stature as the phys- 
ical and intellectual monarch of the kingdom of 
life. But to round up the story of human evolu- 
tion it seemed necessary to consider man from the 
moral standpoint, and it now appears equally desir- 
able to review his relations to the spiritual element 
of the universe. Having dealt with the develop- 
ment of man as a mortal being, we have now to 
regard him as a possibly immortal being. 

This outlook into the supreme domain of nature 
lifts us, for the first time in our work, definitely 
above the lower world of life. There is nothing 
to show that the animals below man have any 
conception of the spiritual. It is true that there 
are various statements on record which seem to 
indicate in some animals, the horse and the dog, 
for instance, a dread of unseen powers, a recogni- 
tion of some element in nature which is invisible to 
the eyes of man. But what these facts indicate, 
what influences affect the rudimentary intellect of 
these animals in such instances, no one is able to 

Q 225 


226 MAN AND HIS ANCESTOR 


say. Though some vague recognition of powers 
or existences beyond the visible may arise in their 
narrow minds, it does not probably pass beyond 
the level of instinct, and doubtless lies almost 
infinitely below man’s conception of the spiritual. 
In this stage of intellectual development, then, 
we have to do» with a condition which seems to 
belong solely to man, or has but a germinal exist- 
ence in the lower organic kingdom. 

In fact, primitive man may well have been as 
devoid of the conception of a realm of spirit as was 
his anthropoid ancestor. The lowest savages of 
to-day are almost, if not quite, lacking in such a 
conception, and are destitute of anything that can 
fairly be called religion. Where apparent reli- 
gious ideas exist among them we cannot be sure to 
what extent they have been infused by civilized 
visitors, or how far ardent missionaries, in their 
anxiety to discover some trace of religion in sav- 
ages, have themselves inadvertently suggested the 
beliefs which they triumphantly record. The 
Pygmies of Africa, the Negritos of Oceanica, and 
various debased tribes elsewhere, may possibly be 
quite destitute of native religious conceptions, at 
least of a higher grade than those which move 
the horse and dog to a dread of the unseen. It 
should be borne in mind that these tribes have for 
thousands of years been in some degree of contact 
with more developed races and subject to educa- 
tive influences, and the crude religious conceptions 


MANS RELATION TO. THE SPIRITUAL 227 


which some travellers attribute to them may well 
have been derived, not original. 

Investigation in this field certainly gives us 
abundant warrant to believe that primitive man, 
on whose mind no influences of education could 
act, was destitute of religion, and that man’s con- 
ception of the unseen arose gradually, as one im- 
portant phase of the development of his intellect. 
Any attempt to trace the stages of this religious 
development is far beyond our purpose, even if 
we were capable of doing it. It must suffice to 
say that man everywhere, when he emerges into 
history as a semicivilized being, is abundantly sup- 
plied with mythological and other religious concep- 
tions which indicate a long preceding evolution 
in this field of thought. 

For extended ages the realm of the unseen has 
been acting upon the mind of man; filling him 
with dread of malevolent and reverence for benef- 
icent powers, inspiring him to acts of worship, 
peopling his imagined heavens with imagined 
deities, and giving rise to an extraordinary variety 
of deific tales and mythological ideas. The liter- 
ature of this subject would fill a library in itself, 
and is almost abundant enough to supply one with 
reading for a lifetime. Yet it is largely, if not 
wholly, ideal; it is in great part based on false con- 
ceptions and misdirected imaginings; it rarely 
adduces evidence, and such evidence as is offered 
is always questionable; in short, scientific investt- 


228 MAN AND HIS ANCESTOR 


gation and the critical pursuit of facts have taken 
no part in the development of religious systems, 
and a deep cloud of doubt envelops them all. 

It is by no means our purpose to seek to throw 
discredit on any of the great religions of the world. 
To say that they have been products of evolu- 
tion is not to invalidate them. Much that is true 
and solid has arisen through evolution. To say 
that they lack scientific evidence is not to question 
their validity. Many of the subjects with which 
they deal lie beyond the reach of scientific evi- 
dence. Science has hitherto dealt strictly with the 
physical; it has made almost no effort to test the 
claims of the spiritual. In fact, the highest of 
these claims, that of the existence of a deity, must 
lie forever beyond its reach. God may exist, and 
science grope for Him through eternity in vain. 
Finite facts can never gauge the infinite. Proofs 
and disproofs alike have been offered of the exist- 
ence of an infinite deity, but the problem remains 
unsolved. None of these proofs or disproofs are 
positive; they all depend on ideal conceptions, and 
ideas are always open to question; positive facts 
on either side of the argument are, and are always 
likely to be, wanting, and the belief in God must 
be based on other than scientific grounds. 

But when we come down to the lower levels of 
the domain of the spiritual we find ourselves on 
firmer ground. Here we are dealing with the 
finite, not with the infinite, and nothing that is 


MAN’S RELATION TO THE SPIRITUAL 229 


finite can lie beyond the boundaries of investiga- 
tion, however long it may take to reach it. The 
‘question of the existence of spirits, for instance, — 
that much mooted problem of the immortality, or 
at least of the future existence, of man, which 
forms so prominent an element in modern reli- 
gion, —dwells within the possible reach of sci- 
ence, and the attempt to deal with it by scientific 
evidence may reasonably be made. When we pass 
beyond the realm of the senses we find ourselves 
in a kingdom peopled by stupendous forms and 
forces, — space, time, matter, energy, and perhaps 
infinite consciousness, — all in their ultimate con- 
ditions too vast for the finite mind to grasp, all pre- 
senting problems open to speculation, but beyond 
the reach of demonstration. But below these lie 
finite possibilities which the human mind may now 
be, or may become, capable of comprehending, and 
prominent among these lies the problem just men- 
tioned, that of the existence of a spiritual substra- 
tum in man, a soul which is capable of surviving 
the death of the body. This is a subject with which 
all of us are deeply and intimately concerned, and 
it may be well to close this volume with a brief 
glance at its status as a scientific question. 

The belief in the immortality of man 1s compara- 
tively modern in origin. There is no satisfactory 
evidence that any such belief existed among the old 
Jews, or that it arose in Palestine before the time 
of Christ. It arose at an earlier period in India 


230 MAN AND HIS ANCESTOR 


and Persia, but everywhere it was late in its appear- 
ance as a well-defined doctrine. Yet, while positive 
evidence is wanting, there can be little doubt that 
crude and vaguely formulated ideas of the exist- 
ence of man after death have been very long en- 
tertained. ‘The traditions of all peoples that have 
a faith above that of fetichism contain stories of 
the apparition of spirits of human origin, and when 
we reach civilized peoples and more advanced re- 
ligions we find these in abundance. The annals 
of Christendom are full of them. They are equally 
abundant in the centres of other developed forms 
of faith. If we could accept these legends of the 
emergence of spirits through the thin veil that 
separates time from eternity as established facts, 
the problem would no longer need solution. As 
it stands, however, the great mass of such narra- 
tives are utterly lacking in evidence of a character 
which science can admit. They are bare, un- 
sustained statements, thousands of which would 
be far outweighed by a single one fortified by 
demonstrated facts. Occasionally, indeed, the 
story of an apparition has been closely investi- 
gated, and there are a few cases of this kind 
handed down from the past which seem reason- 
ably well established. But any statement coming 
from prescientific days is open to doubt; methods 
of investigation then were not what they are now; 
the dogma of the existence of spirit is too impor- 
tant a one to be accepted on any but incontroverti- 


MAN SEKELALTION TOOLTAE SPIRITUAL “227% 


ble evidence, and the vast sum of statements of 
apparitions which have come to us from the past, 
or from the non-scientific peoples of the present, 
must be dismissed with the one verdict, not proven. 

There is one important fact, however, connected 
with the question of spiritual appearances, which 
is worthy of some consideration. It is a fixed rule 
in the history of opinions that beliefs founded on 
imagination or misconception have declined with 
the advance of enlightenment, and many concep- 
tions, once strongly entertained, have faded and 
vanished in the light of new thought, or where 
retained have been so only by the ignorant and 
unreasoning. It is of interest to find that this 
has not been the case with the belief in spiritual 
manifestations. This has held its own to the 
present time, and, while it is largely sustained by 
the unintelligent and credulous, it can claim a 
considerable body of intelligent adherents to-day, 
even in the most enlightened nations. This belief, 
known as spiritism, with the manifestations upon 
which it is founded, lies open, therefore, to modern 
scientific investigation ; and this has been, to some 
extent, applied to it, with, in various instances, 
rather startling results. 

It is certainly of significance to find that a num- 
ber of prominent scientists, thoroughly skilled in 
the arts of investigation, have attacked this prob- 
lem with the purpose of annihilating it, and have 
ended in becoming convinced of the truth of spirit- 


232 MAN AND HIS ANCESTOR 


ism. It may suffice to mention two of the most 
striking instances of this. In the early days of the 
spiritist propaganda, Robert Hare, a famous chem- 
ist of Philadelphia, entered upon an investigation of 
the so-called spiritual phenomena with the declared 
purpose of proving them to be fraudulent. His 
observations were long continued, his tests varied 
and delicate, and he ended by himself ardently 
adopting the belief he had set out to abolish. 
Somewhat later William Crookes of London, an 
equally famous chemist and physicist, entered 
upon a similar investigation, and with like results. 
The tests applied by these men were strictly scien- 
tific, and of the exhaustive character suggested by 
their long experience in chemical investigation; and 
their conversion to the tenets of spiritism, as a re- 
sult of their experiments, was a marked triumph to 
the advocates of the doctrine. Various others of ad- 
mitted high intelligence, who made a similar investi- 
gation and were similarly converted, might be named. 
Two of the best known of these were Judge Ed- 
monds, of the circuit court of New York, and 
Alfred Russel Wallace of England, who shared 
with Darwin the honor of originating the theory of 
natural selection. 

While these, and others of scientific education, 
were converted to spiritism, many investigators 
came to an opposite conclusion, while a similar 
negative result was reached in the investigations 
of several committees of scientists. The latest 


MAN’S RELATION TO THE SPIRITUAL 233 


and most persistent attempt to search into the real- 
ity of phenomena of this character has been that 
made by the London Society for Psychical Re- 
search, whose investigations have extended over 
years and have yielded numerous striking and sug- 
gestive results. The most important conclusion 
at which the members of this society have so far 
arrived is the hypothesis of Telepathy, or the 
seeming power of one mind to influence the 
thoughts of another, occasionally over long dis- 
tances, in a method that appears analogous to that 
of wireless telegraphy. The evidences in favor 
of this doctrine are so numerous that it has been 
somewhat widely accepted, and the title applied to 
it has come into general use. It indicates, if true, 
remarkable powers in the mind of man, capabilities 
that seem far to transcend those of the ordinary 
intellectual activities. 

This is one side of the case. The other side 
now calls for presentation. This is that the great 
body of scientists utterly reject the theory of 
spiritism, and look upon its manifestations as due 
to fraud, misconception, credulity, or some other 
of the weaknesses to which human nature is liable. 
As regards the opinions arrived at by the promi- 
nent scientists mentioned, these men are looked 
upon by their fellows of the great scientific body 
as mentally warped, or as having allowed them- 
selves to be victimized by impostors. The fact 
that Professor Crookes has continued one of the 


234 MAN AND HIS ANCESTOR 


most acute and deep searching of investigators 
into the phenomena of physics, and that his results 
in this direction are accepted without question, and 
that Professor Wallace is acknowledged to be one 
of the leading thinkers of the day, has not sufficed 
to clear them of the doubt which rests upon their 
sanity or their critical judgment in this particular, 
and the very attempt of any one to investigate the 
so-called spiritual manifestations is widely looked 
upon as an evidence of credulity or some greater 
mental weakness. 

This result may seem singular, yet it is not with- 
out abundant warrant. It must be borne in mind 
that the phenomena in question differ essentially 
in character from those with which science is 
usually concerned. ‘The field of scientific investi- 
gation is distinctly the material; the facts with 
which it deals are those apparent to the senses, or 
which can be tested by material instruments; its 
discoveries are generally susceptible of but one 
interpretation ; its methods are capable of being 
indefinitely repeated, and its results, if justly in- 
terpreted, are unvarying in character. None of 
these postulates fully applies to the spiritistic in- 
vestigation. Here the conditions differ, the results 
vary, the methods can rarely be exactly repeated, 
conscious beings, instead of unconscious instru- 
ments, are the agents employed, and the secret 
thoughts and purposes of such agents are very 
likely to vitiate the result, and open a field of 


MANS RELATION TO THE SPIRITUAL 235 


doubt which does not exist in the investigation of 
the inorganic world. 

This is one of the causes of the doubt of scien- 
tists. It is not the only or the chief cause. The 
latter is the fact that the claims of spiritism lift 
man into an entirely new domain of the universe, 
remove him from the great field of the material 
with which he is physically affiliated and to which 
his senses are closely adapted, and place him in a 
region beyond the scope of the senses, a vast king- 
dom which is held to underlie or subtend the physi- 
cal, and which the ordinary outlook of the scientist 
fails to perceive. It requires no strain of the 
imagination to admit the existence of a new con- 
stituent of the atmosphere. It requires a great 
strain to admit the existence of a new constituent 
of the universe, a vast spiritual substratum to the 
domain of matter. Religion, with its ideal tests, 
has long maintained this to be a fact. Science, 
with its rigid material tests, sternly questions it, and 
demands that the existence of an inhabited spirit- 
ual realm shall be incontestably proved by scien- 
tific evidence before it can be accepted. 

This demand is a reasonable one. The world is 
growing rapidly more scientific, and the old method 
of arriving at conclusions is daily losing strength. 
Beliefs based on ideal or imaginative postulates, 
once strong, are now weak. Faith founded on 
ancient authority is active still, but promises to 
become obsolete. The way of science is growing 


236 MAN AND HIS ANCESTOR 


to be the way of the world, and in the time to 
come intelligent men will doubtless demand in- 
contestable evidence of any fact which they are 
asked to accept. 

As regards the phenomena in question, however, 
it cannot be said that they have been fairly or fully 
investigated by scientists. They have been set 
down as the work of charlatans, and their apparent 
results ascribed to fraud, collusion, credulity, and 
mental obliquity in general. The fact, that of the 
scientists who have exhaustively investigated the 
spiritistic phenomena, a considerable number have 
accepted them as valid, has had no effect upon 
scientists as a body, who, in this particular, occupy 
the position which they accuse non-scientists of 
maintaining, that of forming opinions without in- 
vestigating phenomena. 

This attitude of the scientific world toward these 
problematical occurrences is quite comprehensible. 
Throughout the nineteenth century the attention 
of scientists has been almost wholly directed 
toward the investigation of the forms and forces 
of matter, the phenomena and principles of the 
visible universe. In this they entered, at the 
opening of the century, upon an almost virgin 
field, which they have wrought with great diligence 
and with remarkable results. It is very possible, 
however, that in the twentieth century no such 
undivided allegiance will be given to the phenom- 
ena of matter, but that the attention of scientists 


MAN'S RELATION TO, THE. SPIRITUAL 237 


will be largely diverted from the physical to the 
psychical field of investigation, which may prove 
to be a far broader and more intricate domain than 
we now have any conception of. 

Psychical phenomena have attracted some atten- 
tion during the recent century. One by one the 
problems of hypnotism, unconscious cerebration, 
double consciousness, telepathy, spiritism, and the 
like, all at first set down as unworthy of considera- 
tion, have forced themselves upon the attention of 
observers, and each of them has been found to 
present conditions amply worthy of investigation. 
This work has hitherto been performed by occa- 
sional individuals, but the number of workers in 
experimental psychics is steadily increasing, and 
their domain of research broadening, and we may 
reasonably look forward to results approaching, 
perhaps exceeding, in interest those reached in 
material investigation. 

There is a whole world before us, that of the 
mind and its phenomena, fully equal in interest 
and importance to the world of matter, and 
presenting as numerous and difficult problems. 
Hitherto it has largely been dealt with from the 
ideal or metaphysical standpoint; only recently 
has it been subjected to physical analysis, and 
already with striking results. During the century 
before us it is likely to attract a wide and active 
circle of investigators, with what results it is im- 
possible to predict. This is the only way in which 


238 MAN AND HIS ANCESTOR 


the problem of the existence or non-existence of a 
spiritual life can be solved to the satisfaction of 
those of a scientific turn of mind, and this solution 
must be left to the future to attain. 

In the present work we are concerned with 
man’s past rather than his future. It is what 
man has come from, not what he is going to, that 
forms the subject of our inquiries. We have been 
led into these remarks simply as an outcome of a 
brief consideration of man’s relations to the spirit- 
ual element of the universe, and may close our 
work with the suggestion that the problem of 
human evolution may be immensely greater than 
that involved in the study of the ancestry of man. 


THE DAWN OF REASON 
Or, Mental Traits in the Lower Animals 


By JAMES WEIR, Jr., M.D. 


Author of “ The Psychical Correlation of Religious Emotion 
and Sexual Desire,” etc. 


16mo. Cloth. $1.25 





Review of Reviews: 

“This book presents evidences of mental action of 
the lower animals in a clear, simple, and brief form. The 
author has avoided technicalities, and has also resisted 
the temptation of the psychologist to indulge in meta- 
physics. Dr. Weir has relied for evidence on the results 
of his own independent study of biology at first hand, 
disregarding the second-hand data used by many of the 
authors once regarded as standard authorities in this 
department of research.” 


The Nation: 

“The title raised in our mind some vague fears that 
we might find physiology and psychology mixed up inex- 
pertly with metaphysics ; but we see in the writer a close 
observer, who takes his stand on firm ground, and goes 
into the objective world of animals for his facts.” 


THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 
66 FIFTH AVENUE, NEW YORK 















































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